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Monday, February 26, 2018

Wine and Food: Are They Craft or Art?

by Dwight Furrow

The explosion of interest in the aesthetics of food and beverages over the past several decades inevitably raises the question whether certain culinary preparations or wines can be considered works of art. I have argued elsewhere that indeed food and wine can be works of art. But within the wine and food world many winemakers and chefs prefer to think of themselves as craft persons rather than artists, and in philosophy there is substantial resistance to including food and wine in the category of a fine art. The question of how we distinguish a craft from an art is thus germane to this debate.

Unfortunately, traditional ways of drawing the distinction between craft and the fine arts are inadequate. In fact, a too sharply drawn distinction between art and craft will mischaracterize both. Nevertheless, I think there is a distinction to be made between art and craft and at least some wines and culinary preparations are best viewed as works of art.

As Larry Shiner has pointed out, both the term "fine art" and the term "craft" are relatively recent inventions. ""Craft" as the name of a category of disciplines only goes back to the late nineteenth century when it emerged partly in reaction to machine production, and partly in reaction to the fine art academies' exclusion of the "minor," "decorative," or "applied" arts." Fine art, according to Shiner, was a phrase used to market works of art to the emerging middle class marking off craftwork, works that are merely useful, from works that were "the appropriate object of refined taste."

In the past we might have used the type of material being worked on to distinguish art from craft. Paint on canvas, words on a page, notes played by instruments were candidates for works of art. The transformation of wood, clay, metals or fabric was craft. But since the birth of installations and the expansion of materials used for artistic expression, artists today work in media such as textiles, plastics, metals and wood. So the type of material will no longer suffice to mark the distinction. Why then not food or wine as candidates for artistic expression?

Since the 18th Century, as noted above, the usual way of drawing the distinction between art and craftwork, relying especially on the work of Immanuel Kant, is that works of art are intended for contemplation while craftwork is intended to serve some utilitarian purpose. Kant argued explicitly that food, regardless of how finely prepared, does not induce reflection and thus cannot qualify as art. Regarding this latter point about reflection, Kant is entirely wrong. Certainly food and wine can be and are, in the right context, capable of inducing reflection and are appreciated for their aesthetic properties. After the work of Korsmeyer and others that seems no longer up for debate. Nevertheless, food and wine do serve purposes other than contemplation, and thus would still fail to qualify as an art on Kantian grounds. Yet the very distinction that Kant wants to draw has really fallen on hard times. Many works of art serve a function other than contemplation—architecture is the most salient example but music serves many purposes as does commemorative sculpture, religious paintings, political art, etc. All are typically intended to have non-contemplative uses, yet they remain art objects despite their versatility. Thus, the claim that having a non-contemplative function makes an object a work of craft rather than art seems indefensible given the plethora of counter examples.

Charles Collingwood in the early 20th Century argued that craftwork had a clearly defined end that the craftsperson is aiming at whereas art is open-ended with the artist adjusting her aim as the process of creation proceeds. This is an interesting claim because Collingswood is rightly focused on the process of creation. But I'm afraid Collingswood's distinction misconstrues the processes of craftwork. Some crafts involve continuously working back and forth between initial ideas and their embodiment and there is nothing inherent in the idea of craft that precludes the craftsperson making spontaneous discoveries and modifying her aim in light of these discoveries. As Shiner points out, people who work in crafts build a repertoire of intuitive skills over time that enable them to manipulate their media, giving them the opportunity to spontaneously modify their process in a way that involves constant monitoring and judgment.

More recently, Stephen Davies has argued that craftwork lacks aesthetic properties or was not made with the intention to express aesthetic properties. But this too seems implausible. Even a well hung door or a finely tuned engine are aesthetic and intended to be so, in that a kind of perceptual appreciation is inherently part of the achievement. I think most would agree these are crafts.[i]

A more substantive distinction between art and craft has been advanced by Shiner. He argues, following the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto, that the distinction between art and craft is a continuum that involves the subordination of meaning to process. For Danto, works of art must have meaning; they must be about something, express ideas, and invite interpretation. According to Shiner, craftwork does not have the robust structures of meaning that require interpretation or express ideas.

I do think some culinary preparations and some wines have meaning and demand interpretation. A dish refers to the tradition from which it emerges and invites interpretation in light of that tradition. Wines refer to both regional traditions and the expression of both the vineyard in which the grapes are grown and the vintage which significantly alters the aesthetic properties of the wine; wines invite interpretation in light of these factors. Thus, I am happy to argue for them as works of art on those grounds. Yet, I worry about this move as a general theory of art. It is not at all obvious to me that some abstract painting and especially instrumental music demands interpretation or expresses ideas. This depends on what we mean by "interpretation" but to the extent we think of interpretation as a cognitive operation involving ideas and semantic content it isn't obvious that the sensual and emotional aspects of music or certain abstract paintings are well captured by this notion of meaning. Furthermore, craftspersons also work in traditions and their works make reference and invite comparisons to other works, a process that would seem to require interpretation. Thus, I'm not persuaded by Shiner's view that it is meaningfulness that marks the distinction between art and craft.

Nevertheless there is a meaningful distinction between craftwork and art. I'm going to rely on an observation to mark the distinction. It seems to me that part of our modern notion of art (and here I mean our normative notion of art, art that we admire and think of as good) is that art must exhibit creativity. It must be innovative, in some sense original, and the innovation must be important and valuable. Above all, works of art are works of imagination that constitute a departure from the everyday and the mundane. They surprise us and move us because of their unfamiliarity. Creativity constitutes the distinctive kind of accomplishment that is a work of art. I don't think we have the same demand for innovation or originality with regard to craftwork. We admire the skill with which a piece of furniture is constructed and appreciate the way the grain of the wood is highlighted without much concern about whether it is innovative or original and without assessing the degree of imagination or creativity that went into its making.

According to this standard both some cuisine and some wine qualify as works of art. Cuisine, today, is a surely a medium of creativity, especially the concoctions of modernist cuisine which fundamentally modify the molecular structure of food in order to create new taste sensations. Creative chefs are continually striving for innovations that transform the boundaries of taste. Thus, although traditional cooking may be more craft-like because it is for the most part focused on the execution of traditional recipes, modern food design appears more art-like in its pursuit of originality.

Winemaking appears to be a harder case because many top winemakers insist that winemaking is not about their creativity but about the quality of their grapes. Yet this modesty belies the fact that winemakers are similar to artists in their general intentions regarding aesthetic creativity and innovation. Winemakers intend to produce something of aesthetic interest that has meaning in light of the winemaking traditions they work in. They also are cognizant of the creative possibilities within their medium and materials, the genres and styles they work in, and that emerge as the work is evolving.

Furthermore, originality and distinctiveness are abiding concerns of most winemakers, with the exception of those producing commodity wines that you find in the supermarket. I seldom meet artisan winemakers who would be content to discover their wines taste like those of the guy next door. Thus, part of this background of creative intentions is an implicit understanding of what counts as original within their winemaking culture. The fact that it's the distinctiveness of their vineyard that, in part, makes their wines original does not reduce the need for aesthetic creativity and imagination since aesthetic creativity in any artistic genre relies on taking steps to recognize and preserve distinctiveness. Imagination enters very early in the winemaking process when winemakers taste their grapes in the vineyard and must then imagine a range of aesthetic outcomes that what they taste will make possible. Thus, the most important background commitment that yields distinction and originality in wine is an aesthetic sensibility developed through years of tasting. Winemakers taste repeatedly throughout the process of winemaking from sampling grapes in the vineyard to determining the final blend. In the end, it is what they taste that influences what they do. And because each individual tastes differently, their final product, if not distorted by the goal of homogeneity or consistency, will be different as well. Even though the goal for many artisan winemakers is to preserve terroir, the distinctive features of grapes from a particular vineyard or region, what that means will differ for each winemaker; each has an interpretation of what it means to preserve terroir through the idiosyncrasies of taste. (See this post for more on the creative process of winemaking.)

There is of course a question in particular cases about how much creativity is required to qualify as art. But there can be no clear dividing line between art and craft if only because there is no precise way of measuring creativity. As with any distinction there will be clear cases and then cases that are undecidable because they're too close to call. Only the terminally pedantic allow a sorites paradox to disrupt a perfectly good distinction in clear cases.

Monday, January 29, 2018

The Controversy Over Natural Wines: Moral Purity or Moral Preening?

by Dwight Furrow

If you are one of the billions of people on this planet who avoid the wine press you might never have heard of "natural wines". Yet, they are the source of great controversy in the wine world, dividing brother from brother and tearing at the delicate fabric of overwrought sensibilities. It's not quite civil war but it's serious enough to generate plenty of creative insults. To select one example, a Newsweek article was entitled "Why Natural Wine Tastes Worse than Putrid Cider" which, as you might imagine, caused natural wine proponents to launch diatribes against smug, snobbish, closed-minded apologists for "frankenwines". That's the tenor of the debate.

What is this debate about?

Natural wines are wines made without cultured yeast, minimal (or no) use of the preservative sulfur dioxide, no modern winemaking technology such as reverse osmosis or micro-oxygenation, no additives such as mega purple, enzymes, or additional acid, no filtration, and using only grapes grown organically and/or sustainably. Natural wine producers often advertise an aspiration to make wine the way it was made 120 years ago.

So what is wrong with modern winemaking technology? Well, environmental issues such as soil depletion and potentially harmful chemicals to start with, but natural wine enthusiasts also claim modern industrial winemaking destroys flavor, creates generic wines that lack freshness and complexity, and that no longer reflect the unique characteristics of the grapes' origins.

These claims are controversial because modern winemaking technology is, in part, designed to eliminate flaws, bad bottles, and to preserve the wine for shipping and storage. Making (and purchasing) wine without that technology is inherently risky. Many a consumer has opened a bottle of natural wine only to be greeted by fizzy, funky juice that has begun to re-ferment in the bottle because modern filtration techniques were not employed.

It is, moreover, not quite true that natural winemakers eschew modern technology or that conventional winemakers embrace it unreservedly. The natural winemakers I know obsessively test their wines in the lab, use the latest in storage technology, and are scrupulous about cleanliness in the winery using the best equipment they can find to make sure their facilities, storage containers and equipment are free of bacteria. The idea that they are luddites is absurd. And of course they all use electricity and refrigeration so it's not quite 1880. Furthermore, many conventional producers follow sound sustainability practices in the vineyard and winery and try to minimize harmful chemical pesticides and fertilizers.

So why the controversy? On one side, the lovers of conventional wines claim that natural wine enthusiasts are ignoring flavor in favor of a dogmatic ideology, deceived by the romantic lure of the idea of "authenticity" into making inferior wine. On the other side are the natural wine enthusiasts who claim that the wine revolution is upon us if only the close-minded and hidebound apologists for big business would get out of the way. But in the middle are the vast numbers of artisanal wine producers who use technology when necessary but only as a last resort, who believe vineyard expression is what matters most but also believe some technological intervention is sometimes necessary to produce the best wine they can. These winemakers in the middle try to keep their heads down but inevitably get caught in the crossfire.

Part of the controversy arises because the word "natural" is ill-defined and there are no standards for what counts as natural wine. If you want controversy, use the word "natural" in any context and someone will challenge your intent. Food and cosmetic companies have been using the word for decades to imply their competitors are "unnatural" without having to precisely define what they mean. The word has largely been evacuated of meaning—it's a source of empty slogans that allow users to help themselves to virtue without bearing any burdens. When proponents of minimally-processed wines chose "natural" to describe their winemaking practices they were walking into a hornet's nest. But the term "natural" does have the implication that conventional winemakers are making plastic, inauthentic, industrial wines. It is thus no surprise that winemakers, who otherwise are sympathetic to the view that the winemaker should minimize the use of chemical additives and winery tricks when possible, object to an ideological straitjacket when some intervention is necessary to avoid making inferior wine.

By contrast, defender-in-chief of natural wines Alice Feiring insists the word "natural" is squishy only if we allow backsliders and pretenders to get in on the fun:

The category of natural wine is a somewhat slippery slope except predicated by the tenets of nothing added nothing taken away, a touch of sulfur as needed if needed. Basic to the cause is no inoculations and please, no acidifications. There is a transparency in the wines that excite out of control affection for certain drinkers predisposed to the wine roller coaster.

I think Feiring is right that if you stick to the rigorous definition "nothing added, nothing taken away except for a bit of sulfur when necessary", there need be no confusion over the meaning of "natural". But it is precisely the rigor of this ideology that many object to. In some parts of the world and in some vintages technological intervention is the only thing staving off disaster. Yet winemakers who use it are implicitly (or explicitly) falsely accused of being "unnatural", serving up "frankenwines" to the unsuspecting masses with all the connotations of perversion and abnormality the word "unnatural" conveys.

Are natural wine proponents describing their wines accurately or is the word "natural" a sinister marketing device that unfairly mischaracterizes legions of honest winemakers? New York Times wine writer Eric Asimov wrote regarding the word "natural" that "even defining the term incites the sort of Talmudic bickering usually reserved for philosophers and sports talk-radio hosts." I promise not to invoke the Talmud or sports talk radio, but sorting through conceptual distinctions is the job of philosophers so be forewarned—there is hair-splitting ahead.

The word "nature" typically refers to anything that is not supernatural or anything not made or influenced by human beings. But neither of these meanings is helpful: in the former sense everything is natural and in the latter sense nothing is natural (unless we bring other planets into the picture). I doubt there is anything on earth that has not been influenced by human beings—least of all wine grapes. Wine grapes are among the most cultivated of plants; the varieties we have available today are the result of centuries of quite conscious selective breeding in order to exhibit qualities desired by winemakers. There is nothing "untouched by human hands" about grapes or wine.

But there is a third sense of "nature" that I think is more helpful. "Nature" refers to the inherited make up of something—what makes a thing be the sort of thing it is. For example, "human nature" refers to characteristics that distinguish human beings from animals (at least most of us.) For some beings, their natures are given, inherited, not a product of human invention (even though we influence their development). Although the nature of wine grapes is in part determined by human beings, there are constraints and limits to our ability to control the nature of grapes—despite selective breeding their genetic and molecular structure remains that of grapes and not something else. Furthermore, the changes that we make through grafting, cloning, crossing, etc. are themselves natural in that they are an expression of the possibilities inherent in grapes. In other words, despite human cultivation, there is still something "given" about grapes, a potential that is not the product of human intervention, a constitution upon which the cultivation depends.

For some people, this givenness, this inherited constitution, is intrinsically valuable. For folks so inclined, it is important that there be something beyond the human tendency to manipulate and control—a gift or bestowal if you will from which they draw a sense of awe or wonder. Human beings tend to value what is rare and vulnerable. In this tamed and colonized world where humanity's footprint is everywhere, even a partially non-human "given" is rare and vulnerable, and so the natural wine movement locates intrinsic value in this "given". They value the gift that weather, soil, and the inherited constitution of grapes bestow on the winemaker who must respect this "given" by keeping interventions to a minimum. It doesn't matter that the grapes are cultivated; what matters is that a sense of the "given" is preserved.

Is the word "natural" being misused here? No. This use of the word "natural" to mean "essential, inherited characteristics" is a standard usage. But notice that this use does not contrast with perverted or abnormal. The appropriate contrast would be the "accidental" (in philosophical parlance), something added on but not necessary, human artifice, a nature more fully shaped by humans, as conventionally-made wines would be.

Does a reverence for nature as an inheritance entail disdain for artifacts and human contrivances? Must there be an implicit negative judgment regarding standard winemaking if one loves natural wines? It is hard to see what would justify such an attitude, other than mere personal preference. There is nothing wrong with having reverence for an increasingly rare natural world. But it is hard to credit a general disapproval toward human intervention as such since much of the modern world would then be a source of disapproval. This is at best an eccentric viewpoint and at worst utterly misanthropic. We can praise the gift of nature and honor human achievement without invidious comparisons. We can enjoy both natural wines and enjoy conventional winemaking without making moral judgments. To the degree proponents of natural wine help themselves to dollops of moral virtue, rather than simply good taste, they stray into this territory of eccentricity and their critics are right to take exception. If you like natural wines that's fine but the moral high horse is unbecoming.

However, there is another side to this debate that I do find disturbing, and that is a general dismissive attitude toward debate. The attitude I find most disturbing is one expressed by Matt Kramer whose writing I usually admire. He writes

For those of us on the sidelines, watching the crusaders on both sides saddle up for yet another joust leaves a bad aftertaste. And that is surely not what fine wine is supposed to be about.

The idea that we shouldn't disagree about these things takes wine out of the realm of the aesthetic. As philosopher Immanuel Kant insisted, the idea of beauty (as opposed to mere subjective preference) produces judgments that aspire to be universal. The fact that the taste of wine matters enough to argue about and take sides with the aim of convincing others means that wine is not just a preference but an attempt to experience something of genuine value and import. If it were like a preference for Orange Maid or Sunkist then arguments would be beside the point. Everyone in the wine world should welcome this controversy because it is a sign that wine is not merely a commodity like orange juice but a work of art worthy of our commitment.

In the end, we cannot distinguish flavor from the idea of what we're drinking. Flavor is an idea influenced by our past, our environment, and most importantly our thoughts about what we're tasting. Natural wine enthusiasts are not ignoring flavor in favor of dogma. They define flavor differently because they have a different idea of what flavor should be. The current conventional notion that great wine must be made from very ripe grapes, filtered and refined to remove any rough edges, and heavily oaked to add complexity is itself a kind of dogma. There is no neutral ground called "flavor" that defines what flavor is and our various ideologies inevitably influence our judgments about taste.

In closing, let me weigh in on the controversy about taste. Some natural wines are better than others. Some are flawed, some are just ordinary. But some are extraordinary. Someone who claims that they all taste like "putrid cider" is just ignorant. The trick is to know the producer so you can return a bad bottle, buy local if possible, and drink young if you're worried about storage problems.

If you're curious about natural wines, you won't find them in the supermarket or big box stores. Even smaller shops that specialize in fine wine will not necessarily carry them although their market penetration is increasing. Some wine shops like Vino Carta in San Diego with an online purchase option feature them. But the best source is to go directly to the winery's website. Berkeley's Donkey and Goat (see my review here) and Cruze Wine Co. in Petaluma are notable California natural wine producers. Sicily's Mt. Etna boasts two natural winemakers of note, Frank Cornelissen and Massimiliano Calabretta. (See my review of Calabretta's Vino Rosso here.) They are easy to find with a bit of searching.

These wines are intriguing and distinctive and like all wine types, run the gamut from swill to swell. You can't judge them unless you try them.

Monday, January 01, 2018

Is Wine a Living Thing?

The claim that wine is a living organism is something I hear often from people in the wine world impressed with the capacity of wine to evolve. Writer and sommelier Courtney Cochran writes:

Wine, with its clear ties to the lifecycle of plants, its ability to evolve and change (to grow) and its delicate fragility in the face of danger (TCA, oxygen, light), fairly screams "alive." In today's overly sanitized, automated world, could our wine be more alive – perhaps even more ‘human' – than us?

Wine grapes react in a very sensitive way to the conditions under which they are grown. They are a product of an ecosystem as well as a reflection of that ecosystem with the characteristics of the vineyard, community, winemaker and weather living on in the wine—a storehouse of the past, a series of "memories" that are transmitted to the consumer in the flavors and textures of the wine.

Even after the grapes are harvested and fermented, wine as it ages responds to stimuli, adapts to its environment, and like a child, requires guidance and nurturing to reach its potential, expressing its aesthetic worth through its own "evolutionary" path, influenced but not wholly directed by the winemaker. People in the culture of wine think of it as "living" because wine not only persists but changes and in some cases improves with age. There is a trajectory of maturation that is in some respects similar to the development of living organisms.

The claim that wine is a living thing has also received philosophical endorsement. In philosopher Nichola Perullo's introduction to his edited, online anthology "WineWorld: Tasting, Making, Drinking, Being", he advocates treating wine as a living thing in order to reform tasting practices and gain a deeper understanding of the aesthetics of wine production, especially in light of the fact that wine is ultimately assimilated to our own living tissue. If we take this view on board, wine is best understood not as a commodity but as something with emotional resonance and authenticity, an object we can engage with as emotional beings, not just through analytical tasting.

But is wine really a living thing or is this discourse just making use of a particularly resonant and vibrant metaphor?

Definitions of life in biology are controversial, especially when the task of definition tries to accommodate the possibility of extra-terrestrial life and artificial life. But for most purposes there is a conventional definition that includes several criteria. Living organisms maintain homeostasis, are composed of cells, undergo metabolism, grow, adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, and reproduce.

Obviously, wine lacks the capacity for sexual reproduction. Furthermore, although wine develops, it doesn't grow biologically since it lacks a cellular structure that undergoes mitosis or meiosis. Neither is its development explained by Darwinian evolution. It thus seems implausible to think of wine as a living thing except in a metaphorical sense since it doesn't share many of the most important characteristics of life. Yet, it isn't obvious how we should understand the criteria this working definition of life employs. Mules, most bees, elderly human beings, and the last rabbit on earth are all alive, yet cannot reproduce. Thus, reproduction is apparently not a necessary condition for life. More interestingly, should we discover extraterrestrial beings who pass their genetic code to the next generation via an information processor without sexual reproduction, random mutation, or environmental selection would we deny they possess life if they exhibit all the other characteristics of life? I'm not sure of the answer to this, but I doubt these criteria would any longer have the force of logical necessity were we to make such discoveries.

Of course recently dead organisms also have DNA, proteins, and other components characteristic of life—what they no longer possess are the metabolic processes that make use of these components. Thus the presence of a metabolism would seem to be the central feature of life. Does wine have a metabolism?

The question of metabolism with regard to wine is quite interesting and worth considering in some detail. Metabolic processes are life sustaining chemical processes that convert fuel to energy in order to run cellular processes, maintain cellular structure, and eliminate waste. It is metabolism that enables organisms to grow, reproduce, and respond to their environment. The reactions governing the breakdown of food to obtain energy are called catabolic reactions. The use of that energy to synthesize larger molecules from smaller molecules is called an anabolic reaction. If the catabolic reactions release more energy than can be used by the anabolic reactions, then the energy is stored by building fat molecules. If the anabolic reactions need more energy, they use stored energy to compensate.

Obviously, wine grapes are the result of a series of metabolic processes taking place in the vine and fruit. Fermentation is also a metabolic process since yeasts are living organisms that produce alcohol by consuming sugar producing a waste product, carbon dioxide, in the process. Almost all red wines and some white wines also undergo a secondary fermentation, catalyzed by bacteria, in which malic acid is converted to lactic acid. Thus, up to the point at which the wine is ready to age, there are metabolic processes that explain the development of the wine providing at least some reason for claiming wine is a living organism.

However, much of the development of wine and its resistance to degradation occurs after the yeast cells are inactive and have been removed. Does it make sense to claim that wine in the barrel or the bottle is nevertheless alive? There is much about the aging process of wine that we still do not understand. But it appears to be the case that the process of building structure in a wine, if not metabolic, is a close analogue to a metabolic process. This point will require a brief and overly simplified introduction to how winemakers build structure in wines. To further simplify matters I will focus on red wine.

The ability of certain wines to take up and deploy oxygen when young is a key factor in how a wine will develop through the aging process. This ability depends on the management of tannins. Tannins are phenolic compounds responsible for the drying sensation you get on the finish of a red wine. However, their purpose goes far beyond providing the sensation of breadth and power we get when tasting. Tannins are crucial in preserving the wine and giving it complexity. Tannins exist as polymers in the skins and seeds of wine grapes. During fermentation when tannins come into contact with acidic grape juice the polymers break down, but during the aging process they reform as wine polymers. Driven by the polarity of water, they aggregate into colloids that in well structured wines should be small and stable. These small, stable colloids ultimately give the wine a soft mouthfeel as well as integrated flavors and aromas, while protecting the wine from oxidation thus enhancing the longevity of the wine as it sits in your wine cellar.

The creation of this fine colloidal structure depends on promoting the early polymerization of tannins while at the same time preventing that polymerization from getting out of control. These goals are achieved via oxygen and the stabilization of color. Tannins in grape skins are capable of taking up an oxygen molecule and as a result become highly reactive, linking up to other phenols creating a cascade of polymer formation, which protects the wine from oxidation later as it matures. But this polymer formation is controlled by making sure there is sufficient color extracted from the grapes. The color molecules cap off the ends of the tannin polymers ensuring that the polymers being formed are short and will feel soft on the palate. This has the added effect of resisting the formation of long chain polymers that will too readily precipitate out of the wine. (This is the residue you find at the bottom of a well-aged bottle.) The presence of oxygen stabilizes the color by creating colloids to which the color can bond.*

Thus, although oxygen in the environment is the enemy of finished wine, causing it to degrade rapidly once the bottle is opened, in the winemaking process it is essential in building structure. This early introduction of oxygen has long been the purpose of barrel aging but can be done via the technology of micro-oxidation today. This is in part why you find young red wines that are soft and smooth on the supermarket shelf. However, although controversial, the early introduction of oxygen allows winemakers who want to make cellar worthy wines to capture and preserve even more tannin since the oxygen increases the capacity of the tannins to bond, thus building structure for aging potential although these wines when young will be harsh and will take time to come around.

Whether the early introduction of oxygen will be successful or not depends in part on the grape varietal. Cabernet Sauvignon has a voracious appetite for oxygen and this is in part why it ages well. Sauvignon Blanc, not so much.

Tannins will continue to evolve over the course of the life of a wine, whether in barrels or bottles. During aging they continue to polymerize into larger molecules with higher molecular weight, bonding with color molecules as well which then drop out of the wine creating sediment in the bottle. The result, if the wine is well made, is a lighter color, reduced bitterness, and a satin-like mouthfeel, depending of course on storage conditions.

As noted above, in a finished wine (ignoring the presence of bacteria and their by-products which may be influencing wine flavor) there are no cells to undergo catabolic or anabolic reactions so strictly speaking this aging process is not a metabolic process. But there are a series of chemical processes that use oxygen as a fuel to synthesize larger molecules, the chemical bonds being a form of stored energy. These larger molecules enable the structure of the wine to develop into a coherent system that would otherwise fall apart, supporting esterification, hydrolysis and other chemical reactions that give wine its character, and defend that structure from degradation thus achieving a kind of homeostasis. Although these processes require some intervention from the winemaker to bring elements together at the right time there is a good deal of self-maintenance—once the elements are in place the wine develops on its own, according to its internal structure, with the winemaker making only occasional adjustments. The idea of self-maintenance is itself problematic with living organisms since many social organisms can maintain their biological functions only with the help of others.

The upshot of this description of the chemistry of wine production is that we are in ambiguous territory with the question of wine as a living thing. Using biological criteria, wine may not be alive but it is surely life-like with processes that resemble homeostasis and metabolism. Establishing this likeness does not settle the question of whether wine is a living thing but it clarifies why many have been tempted to attribute life to a solution of chemicals resting in a bottle.

As I mentioned above, this definition of life I have been using is fraught with difficulties. There are living organism that can't reproduce; ambiguous entities such as viruses that can't reproduce on their own and lack a metabolism; and the prospects of artificial life on the horizon will ultimately scramble our definition of life. Thus, many biologists and philosophers of science have defended an alternative model for defining life, called living systems theory, which gets us closer to a better understanding of the nature of wine.

According to Living Systems theory, living systems are self-organizing systems that have the characteristics of life and interact with their environment via the exchange of material and information. A single cell is a living system, but so is a nation. All living systems depend on processes that enable survival and propagation. Some of these systems are metabolic processes which take in and store energy while others process information that enables control of the system. Thus, the defining characteristic of life is the ability to maintain over time a state in which disorder (entropy) within the system is lower than in its non-living surroundings. All living systems have complex organic molecules such as DNA or RNA that enable some of their properties but information flow is also essential. It's the process of maintaining order via self-organization that distinguishes life from non-life.

Perhaps wine is best thought of as part of a living system that includes the vineyard and regional ecology, the winemaker and her staff, and the larger wine community which provides feedback, material resources and aids in the exchange of information. The evolution and reproduction of the wine is a function of the interaction of all these components. The vineyard along with the winemaker and her staff reproduce the wine each year in a way that replicates the signature and identity of the wine. Decisions by the wine community give feed back to the replicators influencing their decisions about wine quality. Thus, reproduction occurs via a web of relationships and is not a function of the internal mechanisms of metabolism and cell division within the wine. Instead wine reproduction depends on a chain of processes that have to do with information flows, planning, interaction with weather and soil, along with the biological mechanisms of the human beings that are components in the system. In the end, it's really the connection to human culture that gives wine its ability to exhibit those features of evolution that we identify with life.

Yet, as I argued last month on this site, wine has "thing power", an ability to evolve according to its own dispositions in ways not intended by the humans that are part of the system. Wine has its own quasi-agency, its own developmental potential, which explains some of our fascination with it and distinguishes it from commodities that are fully under our control. Wine has a degree of independence not only for system maintenance but for development that we typically associate with living things.

Wine is indeed a living thing if we understand "living thing" as the locus of a dynamically interacting system rather than a discrete, mute object.

Monday, December 04, 2017

Vinous Vitality

by Dwight Furrow

Contemporary discussions of wine quality tend to oscillate unhelpfully between subjectivism and objectivism. One side argues that wine quality is thoroughly subjective because individual differences among tasters preclude agreement on the nature or quality of what is being tasted. The other side points to objective, scientific analyses of chemical components detected through taste and smell, but such analyses cannot explain what makes a wine distinctive or aesthetically valuable. Thus, neither side can explain our tasting practices and the attention we pay to wine quality. If you're a subjectivist there is no such thing as wine quality. But within objective, scientific analysis, aesthetic quality never shows up. To extricate ourselves from this interminable dialectic we need a clearer understanding of what wine is--an ontology of wine if you will. This might seem like a strange question. Don't we know what wine is? Wine is a thing, a liquid containing alcohol that we drink for pleasure or consume with food. But herein lies the problem. We tend to think of objects in the world, including wine grapes and bottles of wine, as inert substances just sitting there until we decide to do something with them. If the grapes or the wine are of interest, it's because we confer value on them. This is a mistake because it reinforces the unhelpful subject/object dualism just mentioned. But what's the alternative?

I want to sketch the alternative by invoking some recent work in ontology articulated by the political philosopher Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter. Bennett does not discuss wine but her way of linking the ontology of things to an aesthetic appreciation of them can help make sense of our love of wine and expose the limits of these notions of subjectivity and objectivity that persist in our discourse.

Bennett argues that all matter including the inorganic is pulsing with life. Obviously the word ‘life' has a special meaning for Bennett since we don't normally think of inorganic objects as alive. Essentially, by "life", she means the ability to act and be acted upon. When thinking of objects as stable, largely passive objects until acted upon by something else, the most important actors are human beings, fulsome subjects actively manipulating the world to serve human ends. With regard to wine such a picture seems on the surface quite defensible. After all, we make the wine and enjoy the wine, and wine is as deeply a part of human culture as blue jeans and automobiles. But Bennett argues this picture of the relationship between human beings and things is misleading and incomplete. She shows how worms, a dead rat, or gun powder residue have the capacity to act, influencing their environment in ways not intended and often not comprehended by human beings. Worms, it turns out, make vegetable mold and thus seedlings possible and protect buried artifacts from decay, thus helping both to enable and preserve human culture. A bit of detritus, gunpowder residue, can catalyze a jury to judgment. A dead rat surprisingly sparks an aesthetic response.

All things, human and non-human, organic or inorganic, exist in a complex network of relations and each thing is disposed to change in ways that have the capacity to shape that web of relations, without necessarily being thoroughly predictable or immediately available for conceptualization. Thus, things not only have the capacity to block human intentions but also to act as quasi-agents with dispositions and trajectories of their own producing profound effects on the things around them. Things and their powers are not reducible to the contexts in which human beings place them and are not exhausted by the meanings we assign to them.

How does this apply to wine?

Putting aside an important distinction between industrial and artisan winemaking for the moment, the relationship between winemaker and her materials--the grapes and other materials that contribute to the winemaking process--is complicated. Winemaking is inherently a collection of open-ended problems that can be provisionally solved only via experimentation and seldom finally resolved. Grapes are uniquely responsive to differences in climate, weather, soils, and the geology of the site on which they are grown. Even within vineyards, subtle differences in soil composition or aspect to the sun can have profound effects on the character of the grapes. Furthermore, each vintage is a new challenge because each vintage is subject to distinctly different weather patterns, each vineyard has unique characteristics that require individual solutions to problems that may not be generalizable, and even materials such as wine barrels have individual characteristics that influence the wine in ways that are not fully predictable. Thus, the idea that the winemaker is in charge and that the grapes and other materials are lying about waiting to be used, set in motion by the winemaker's intention, is misleading. No doubt the winemaker and her team make a substantial difference in determining the taste of the wine. Winemakers continually make selections that influence wine quality and a wine's distinctive characteristics. But that outcome is seldom a certainty and it is often impossible to give a comprehensive account of whom or what is responsible for causing an effect to occur. The vineyard, grapes, and equipment are agents at least in the sense that they have their own dispositions that are not fully under the control of the winemaker. Thus, there are multiple centers of causal power and the winemaker's intentions play a role, but none of these factors can guarantee outcomes, and to be effective means to make a difference, not to exercise total control.

This conception of winemaking fits well Bennett's ontology in which, for any event, there is no single cause or ultimate source. Events are complex with multiple causes and an array of conditions that explain them. As Bennett writes "any action is always a trans-action, and any act is really but an initiative that gives birth to a cascade of legitimate and bastard progeny" (101).

In addition to this relative independence from human intention, things also have a tendency to persist, to maintain their integrity in the face of attack, to continue their motion, a form of inertia that sometimes requires change and adaptation in response to environmental pressures, which again may have little to do with human intentions. These dispositions and tendencies that don't quite fit neatly into human conceptual frameworks have a vividness to them that Bennett calls thing-power. Thing-power calls to us focusing our attention on its singularity and excessiveness and to the diverse, mutually affective, web of relations in which a thing exists even when its effects don't intersect with human concerns. Bennett characterizes thing power as a kind of wildness, explicitly invoking Henry David Thoreau in her account.

For Bennett even the most ordinary things are strange. Regarding a glove, some pollen, that dead rat, a bottle cap and a stick, Bennett writes:

"I caught a glimpse of an energetic vitality inside each of these things, things that I generally conceived as inert. In this assemblage, objects appeared as things, that is as vivid entities not entirely reducible to the contexts in which (human) subjects set them, never entirely exhausted by their semiotics….I achieved, for a moment, what Thoreau had made his life's goal: to be able, as Thomas Dumm puts it,'to be surprised by what we see.'" (4)

As any winemaker or farmer knows, nature resists our attempts to control it and those unique, surprising characteristics that emerge from the grapes or the materials are themselves alluring. That sensitivity to emerging difference, the ability to spot the deviations that nature throws at us, is at the very essence of winemaking. In other words, winemakers are especially sensitive to thing-power. Things have a dual nature in which they have simultaneously a use value for humans and something about them that is unique and enchanting because they are "wild". Their resistance to us itself is alluring.

Instead of thinking of a finished wine as the product of an intention planned in advance, the winemaking process is what Bennett calls "a swarm of vitalities". The task for the winemaker is to "identify the contours of the swarm, and the kind of relations that obtain between its bits". Thus, there is agency and intentionality but neither can guarantee outcomes, and to be effective means to make a difference, not to exercise total control.

In trying to control the winemaking process via intentions, something unintended inevitably emerges. The job of winemaking is to preserve that difference and find a way of presenting it, harmonizing it with other elements of the assemblage of constituents that make up a wine. Without the intentional framework, the new may never show itself. So it's not thoroughly independent of human intention but involves an interface with something initially outside the framework of human meaning.

In the realm of wine, thing-power is not exclusively the province of winemaking. Wine appreciation also requires sensitivity to thing-power. Wine tasters are continually searching for novel taste sensations, new expressions that indicate new directions for a varietal, region, vineyard or winery. It is that sense of discovery that motivates people to travel the world searching for obscure cuvees. Furthermore, today in the culture of wine, the role of context is becoming increasingly salient. The taste of a wine is influenced by price, reputation, atmosphere, music, the people you're with, etc. This contextualization of taste also fits snugly into Bennett's ontology. In our intentional activity, much of what influences us is a background of which we are only dimly aware. Cold air keeps us awake, sounds of machinery can irritate, buildings evoke awe or serenity, the sounds of nature or of music influence our mood, and we are largely only half conscious of these effects. The things we eat and drink influence mood and are influenced by our environment as well. Part of Bennett's argument is that the effects of these objects are not solely a product of social structures or enculturation. Their agency is a product of them being matter that directly influences the body. In this respect, her discussion of the Chinese concept of shi is especially appropriate. She defines shi as follows:

"…it is the mood or style of an open whole in which both the membership changes over time and the members themselves undergo internal alteration… The shi of a milieu can be obvious or subtle, it can operate at the very threshold of human perception or more violently. A coffee house or a school house is a mobile configuration of people, insects, odors, ink, electrical flows, air currents, caffeine, tables, chairs, fluids, and sounds. Their shi might at one time consist in the mild and ephemeral effluence of good vibes, and at another in a more dramatic force capable of engendering a philosophical or political movement" (35).

"Shi" essentially refers to the relative alignment of things, the disposition of forces that enable things to act or to show themselves. Although we can become aware of shi and sometimes modify it, it nevertheless has an agency of its own. Aesthetic objects such as wine seem particularly replete with shi since they often have this capacity to affect us at this threshold of perception.

If we take on board this notion of vinous thing-power, the opposition between subjectivism and objectivism seems no longer appropriate. By definition, thing power escapes subjectivity. It is that part of nature that is not imposed or projected by us. Yet, neither is it definable in terms of objective scientific analysis. There can be no systematic, law-like account of thing-power because thing-power refers to unique, individual assemblages of things. As singular occurrences, it resists the generalizations in which science traffics.

If wine is not reducible to our subjective idea of it, then winemaking and wine appreciation are less about enjoyment and more about discovery, more about unlocking hidden potential than finding something comfortable, more of an adventure than a holiday. It doesn't deny that preferences are subjective but asserts that there is more to wine tasting than preferences. It's about what's interesting, what grabs attention, and piques curiosity rather then what makes you feel good.

Which brings me to the distinction between industrial vs. artisan winemaking. As some of Bennett's examples show, thing-power is not absent from the products of technology. However, while all things potentially have thing-power, it's in contexts where our intentions and plans can be disrupted that thing-power is most salient. Industrial winemaking takes much of the uncertainty and risk out of winemaking, along with the individuality of vineyard and vintage expression. Thus, its potential to generate thing-power is diminished although not eliminated.

Thing power is the recalcitrance and creativity of nature pushing back, reminding us of the importance of the uncanny and the unexpected. The habits of thought that assume we are independent of nature or that nature is a collection of causal mechanisms to be managed by us fails to capture the messiness of reality and we are actually better able to navigate complexity through attentiveness rather than control.

For my purposes here, it gives us insight into the kind of allure wine has. Because, while thing power is in most contexts easy to ignore, and has been ignored by theory until recently, once you acquaint yourself with wine and winemaking, thing-power is unavoidable.

Monday, November 06, 2017

Has Cuisine Reached its Postmodern Moment?

by Dwight Furrow

Perhaps the most important development in cuisine over the last 20 years has been the emergence of what has come to be known as modernist cuisine. Originally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", it is a form of cooking that uses materials and techniques first employed in the food industry to create new dishes and taste sensations. Its proponents now prefer to call it "modernist cuisine" because they view themselves as an avant-garde dedicated to revolutionizing traditional cooking and radically transforming the emotional and sensory dimensions of eating. In traditional cuisine, diners expect what is familiar and the chef delivers. Modernist chefs aim to create novel foods that provoke a reaction, disrupting expectations and forcing diners to revise their conception of what is possible.

As Nathan Mhyrvold, the most prominent theoretician of the movement and author of the cookbook Modernist Cuisinewrites:

This movement is the true intellectual heir to Modernism, and for this reason I think it should be called Modernist cuisine. It shares a number of key characteristics with Modernism. A small avant-garde seeks to overthrow the establishment rules. Change and novelty are valued both as a tool for reforming the intellectually bankrupt rules of the past and as a virtue unto themselves. The Modernist kitchen could easily adopt the command made decades earlier by Ezra Pound to "Make It New!" The creative process is informed by theory and deliberate conceptualizing—these chefs explicitly seek to confront diners and have a dialogue with them. Finally, these chefs are distinctly and self-consciously modern in their outlook, taking whatever technology is available to push forward the realm of the possible.

Thus, dishes such as cocktails that look like marshmallows, egg and bacon ice cream, and orange, flower-shaped lollipops that taste like octopus are among the stranger-than-fiction concoctions these techniques make possible. The rap against modernist cuisine is that it's idiosyncrasy for its own sake, dishes that are interesting without being satisfying, pleasing to the chef who can display virtuosity but not necessarily to the diner who is confronted with unfamiliar mash-ups of incongruous flavors. Thus, there are real questions about whether such cooking will secure a sufficiently large audience to make it viable.

In the U.S. restaurant world, the most prominent practitioner of modernist cuisine has been Grant Achatz of Chicago's Alinea. Located in a utterly non-descript building in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood, Alinea has been at the top of best restaurant lists for the 12 years it has been in existence. It earned its 3rd Michelin star in 2010, is consistently rated in the top 20 restaurants in the world on S. Pelligrino's top 50 list (although it fell to 21 this year) and is widely recognized by other publications as the best restaurant in the U.S. Thus, checking in with Alinea is not a bad way of taking the pulse of modernist cooking. Is it living up to the ideals expressed in Mhyrvold's manifesto? This is the question I posed when anticipating a much coveted reservation recently.

At Alinea, instead of reservations, you now purchase tickets of which there are several types available. For the Gallery menu downstairs there are two 16-18 course seatings each night which include a communal introductory course, a visit to the kitchen while the dining room is transformed into more private spaces, and lots of emotion-invoking aroma and musical theatrics to accompany the food. [The cost is around $300 per person]. Also downstairs, there is a single group table enclosed in a glass box with a view of the kitchen that could be reserved only for groups at least when I was securing my reservation. [$385 per person]. And then there is the Salon upstairs which offers a paired-down menu of 10 courses similar to the Gallery menu but with fewer theatrics, for about $200 per person depending on what time in the evening you want the reservation.]]

The tickets are difficult but not impossible to acquire if your timing is right. Tickets for the upcoming month were released on the 15th of the current month at 10:00 A.M. If you're at your computer at the appointed time and have a generous range of acceptable dates and times, you will likely get a suitable reservation. Unfortunately, even with my good timing I could not get a reservation in the Gallery during the short window of time allotted for our visit to Chicago. (I suspect VIP's had the opportunity to book before tickets were available to the public since many slots were already filled at 10:00 A.M.)Thus, I had to settle for the Salon reservation and opted for their standard wine pairing.

In 2016, Alinea was at the top of its game when Achatz decided to close for several months to remodel the restaurant and retool the menu. After all, if your entire reason to exist is to be on the cutting edge of culinary art, stale familiarity is the kiss of death. Alinea is not really a restaurant. It's performance art and artists are in the business of creating the new. The decision to revitalize seems inevitable when contextualized as a move within an art world. As a practitioner of modernist cuisine, Chef Achatz has no tradition to which he's beholden, no constraints other than the outer limits of what his patrons will accept, and he has an obligation to test those limits. At Alinea diners have no choices; you put yourself in the hands of a chef who has always relished disrupting expectations and challenging assumptions. Like a well-curated art museum, at Alinea it's the allure of surprise and fascination that brings success. In that light, the logic of shutting down for several months in order to create new experiences seems unassailable.

The Postmodern Moment

To my mind, the menu was successful, interesting and absolutely delicious, yet I do think there is some retrenchment occurring with regard to the ideals of modernist cooking articulated by Mhyrvold. I had never before dined at Alinea so I can't speak to earlier menus. But in recent interviews, Achatz claims that in the reinvented version there is plenty of molecular gastronomy going on but it is disguised with ingredients appearing in their natural form with less manipulation than in its previous incarnation. Some of the dishes were in fact quite simple in appearance although flavor complexity was always present. Achatz's current style is to play with form to achieve the unexpected but leave the content intact. There was less flash than I expected, less eye candy and more focused, robust flavor and clarity.

The complaint that modernist cooking is idiosyncratic innovation for its own sake arises because this form of cooking can be risky since part of the point is to flout diners' expectations. But I found nothing that was pushing the envelope of conventional taste at Alinea. There were no dishes that failed, and none seemed just odd with no aesthetic purpose behind them except novelty. In fact, the big surprise was how traditional the flavor combinations were. Each course consisted of flavors typically found together in the region of the world from which the dish originated, but always with a twist that made the dish seem innovative. There was fusion cooking in most courses in that dishes combined elements of Spanish or French cuisine with Japanese or Chinese accents. But such combinations are nothing new; modern fusion cuisine has been around since the 1980's and is hardly revolutionary. At Alinea, there seemed to be a very conscious attempt to root dishes in long-standing traditions while quoting generously from alternative cuisines.

The other feature of the meal that stood out is how weightless and delicate each dish felt. The bold, often earthy flavors were conditioned by ethereal textures, tender, melting, and ever evolving in the mouth. In almost every dish, flavor contrast was achieved through the judicious use of fruit that contributed to the impression of buoyancy. In summary, the meal was fun, the cooking and presentation creative, and above all it was delicious. But "intellectually challenging", a "confrontation" "pushing forward the realm of the possible" not so much. Modernism in the arts began to recede when the disruptive, challenging works of the early 20th Century began to adorn corporate board rooms, its radical pretensions normalized by an art market only to happy to commodify the revolution. It was replaced by an art world willing to recycle traditions, explore context, and generate an endless diversity of styles. Perhaps a similar fate has befallen modernist cuisine, although this is only one data point. Alinea feels much more like postmodern pastiche than a modernist avant-garde.

Of course, as would be expected in the restaurant business, the commodity form of postmodernism disrupts modernist pretensions as well. In interviews with the press, Achatz has said that he's interested in the capacity of food to evoke emotion. He wants diners to feel surprised, intrigued, nostalgic, exhilarated, puzzled, etc. That is all well and good. But food is ephemeral, not a stable object like a painting but an object that is consumed, disappearing relatively soon after it appears. Grasping its point crucially depends on memory and reflection. If we just eat without thinking, without mindful attention, the experience is gone before we can fully understand it. The problem with our meal at Alinea was that it felt rushed. We barely finished a course before the dishes were whisked away and a new course appeared on the table. We had little time to discuss the dishes, ponder the feelings they evoked, or think about their meaning. The experience was like standing before a painting in an art gallery and being told you had only a few minutes to enjoy it before moving on. This is in contrast to tasting menus I've experienced in Europe where the pace is more leisurely. I get that restaurants need to turn tables to make money. But if chefs such as Achatz are serious about food being art, restaurants must provide the opportunity for reflection on what you're eating. Savoring happens not only when the dish is in front of you but afterwards when memory and thought performs the crucial task of clarifying feelings, sorting though confusion and contradiction, and synthesizing random thoughts.

Instead of self-conscious radicalism and innovation it seems to me what Achatz is highlighting is an emotional connection with food. As noted above, Achatz has said that he's interested in the capacity of food to evoke emotion. He wants diners to feel surprised, intrigued, nostalgic, exhilarated, puzzled, etc. If you make yourself available for the emotional resonance of the dishes, they do acquire added meaning. If Achatz succeeds at making us more aware of the subtle almost imperceptible feeling states that are continually regulating conscious experience and are expressed by the food we eat, he will have greatly expanded our enjoyment of food and life. So in the end I think Alinea deserves its reputation. The dishes are thoughtfully conceived and just delicious. Buoyancy, a delight in surprise, emotional resonance, a healthy respect for tradition, and a sensibility for how Asian and European flavors and textures can be combined define Achatz's current cooking style. Whether we call it "modern" or "postmodern" doesn't matter much.

The modernist moment in cuisine was late in coming and if my observation of a retrenchment is right it was short lived although who knows what these mad cooks have in mind to disrupt things in the future. It is in the nature of cuisine that it will oscillate between avant-garde phases and retrenchment since familiarity and comfort are culinary values that are likely to persist alongside our desire for difference and adventure.

If you wish your appetite to be stimulated, here is a blow-by-blow account of our meal with commentary where appropriate:

Two amuse buches led off the proceedings. The first was a spear of romaine lettuce filled with avocado and garlic flowers, the second a banana pancake perched on a lime and filled with Osetra caviar. The contrast between the aggressive spear and the soft, comforting avocado had some emotional resonance. The caviar and pancake was paired with a textured, bready Bollinger Brut Rosé Champagne—the only emotion it evoked was pure delight at the classic, perfect pairing.

The first main course was one of the highlights of the evening. A rich, unctuous, umami-infused seafood and caramelized tomato broth was poured into a bowl containing a gelatin sheet of langoustine that formed a noodle when hydrated and then slowly melted into the broth. Called bouillabaisse on the menu, this bold, intensely flavored broth was accompanied by seaweed encrusted nori wrapped around a filling of creamy, spicy rouille, a chile and saffron sauce traditionally served with bouillabaisse in the the South of France. A melding of Asian and French flavors, the presentation was dark in color, the flavors deep and impenetrable like the sea, set off by the cheerful, encouraging rouille. This was paired with a Rouilly Premier Crus (Chardonnay),a region in the south of Burgundy.

Next up was one of the reversals for which Achatz is famous. The dish is called Bocadillo which is the name of a Spanish sandwich often filled with jamon and cheese. In this case, the gossamer-like crisps forming the sandwich contained the flavors of jamon and cheese; the filling was essentially a viscous, liquid bread (pictured above). The large fruit basket in front of us was drizzled with liquid nitrogen, the "smoke" pouring forth laced with aromas of orange, mingling with a deconstructed gazpacho salad of heirloom tomatoes, frozen sherry and orange, marcona almonds and gooseberries (salad not pictured). As noted above, these are all traditional flavors commonly found together but radically transformed. It was paired with a Rhyme Vermentino from Carneros.

Our trip to Spain was then erased by a pan-Asia dish with Thai and Japanese inflections. A coconut broth surrounds a simple piece of black bass and mussels obscured by a garden of flowers, passion fruit, grapes, kaffir lime leaf, and dehydrated yuzu accompanied by compressed melon. An explosion of flavors and textures, the briny, plump fleshiness of the seafood was continually foiled by sweet fruit. The relentlessly, sunny joy of this dish was tempered by the mysterious black pot of flames set on the table as a centerpiece without explanation. Only a Riesling would pair with this dish—a lovely Weingut Brundlmayer "Heiligenstein" from Kamptal Austria.

This visually gorgeous dish was entitled Glass, referring to the stunningly-hued sheets of blueberry blanketing earthy, maitake mushooms and foie gras, in a sauce inflected with the Chinese tea, lapsang souchong. Once again, Achatz achieves a seamless marriage of French and Asian flavors with fruit providing acid and sweetness to give the dish a lifted, delicate countenance, an impression encouraged by the cool-climate, acid-bomb Syrah by Peay from Sonoma Coast.

And now we finally discover the reason for that mysterious burning pot in the middle of the table. It contains a bed of salt concealing a buried potato. Just a potato, but cooked sous vide for 12 hrs. and kept warm by the burning embers. After digging out the potato, the waiter crushes and mixes it with butter, crème fraiche and black truffle puree. This is rich enough to buy a yacht. One might complain about being served a mere spud but this was a soul-stirring spud, the humble potato proudly dressed to the nines by the velvet truffle.

The last savory dish may be the best single dish I have ever eaten. And it was quite simple. Wood-smoked veal cheeks in a coating of fried wild rice—very Midwestern—and served with a puree of vanilla flavored beef jerky, pineapple and hearts of palm. The contrast between the exterior of crunchy rice and the melting, almost fluid, yet deeply concentrated veal was one of those magical moments of sheer beauty, a fitting end to the savory portion of the meal. These last two dishes were paired with the standard but always reliable Argiano Brunello.

For me desserts are an after thought. The sweet potato, chocolate, miso dish called Rock was sweet, crunchy, and gooey, great fun even if desserts aren't your thing. And finally the dish called Nostalgia was essentially bubblegum ice cream and cake. Even as a kid I wasn't a huge bubblegum fan so this didn't resonate. But that's just me.

Finally, the only dish that survived from the earlier incarnation of Alinea was the grape-flavored balloon filled with helium that ends the meal. When eaten it does the helium thing to your voice. When I read about this years ago it sounded gimmicky—it was.

Monday, October 09, 2017

Merlot's Muse: How Music Influences the Taste of Wine

by Dwight Furrow

When I first encountered the claim that our perception of wine was influenced by the music we listen to while imbibing, I was skeptical. It would seem to have all the hallmarks of a magic trick--barriers to accurate perception due to the vagueness of wines' properties and subject to the power of suggestion. However, the considerable empirical evidence amassed to support the idea has made the thesis impossible to ignore, and I'm persuaded not only by the science but by my own experience that there is something to the idea, although discovering the explanation of how this works remains a challenge.

Winemaker and wine consultant Clark smith started the ball rolling in the mid-1990's testing the relationship between wine and music and carrying out seminars on the subject that continue today. More recently, experimental psychologist Charles Spence and his associates have performed reasonably rigorous empirical tests of the idea (summaries here,here, and here), and there now seems little doubt that there is something going on beyond mere personal association.

The earliest experiments in psychology were testing cross-modal correspondences—the associations we make between features of one sense modality, taste, and the apparently unrelated features of another sense modality, sound. In simple, matching tests, where subjects are encouraged to choose which of two wines, a white and a red, best matches music chosen specifically to "go with" each wine, there has been, consistently over many tests, statistically significant agreement about the best matches. In some cases the agreement was up to 90% of the test subjects. Such evidence, of course, does not tell us what the basis of the matching is. Is there some perceptual similarity between the wines and the music or is the music perceived to be complementing the wine independently of any similarity just as olive oil goes with tomatoes?

There is now a large body of research showing that sweetness and fruit aromas are matched with musical sounds that are high in pitch, notes that are connected smoothly together (legato), as well as consonant harmonies, and instruments such as piano and woodwinds. Sourness tends to match very high-pitched sounds, fast tempos and dissonant harmonies. Aromas of musk, wood, chocolate, and smoke along with bitter tastes match brassy or low pitched sounds. Loud music also seems to be associated with taste intensity.

What explains these perceptual correspondences between sounds and tastes?

Perhaps there is some unknown factor in our environment that explains the correspondence; perhaps we just happen to use similar language in describing wine and music—we use the word "sweet" to describe both. But neither hypothesis seems powerful enough to explain the correspondences. Perhaps the brain happens to code sensory data from both taste and sound in a similar fashion. We will have to wait for further neurophysiological research to test that hypothesis.

More intriguingly there is evidence that these cross modal correspondences are mediated by affective states. The claim is that there are similar feelings associated with both music and wine that mediate the associations mentioned above. As Spence points out, "a number of studies have already highlighted the role of emotion in mediating crossmodal correspondences between colour and music, colour and aroma, shape and taste, and also between basic taste and sound. Therefore, why not think that emotion also mediates the mapping between music and wine." Or perhaps there are similarities between music and wine that account for the results of the data. One could imagine the weight and viscosity of wine, the aggressiveness and grain of the tannins, the prominence of acidity, and the length of the finish might also correspond to the texture, development and amplitude of the music, although these have received less treatment in this research thus far. (I discuss this in more detail below)

As interesting as these correspondences are, more recent research is showing an even tighter relationship between wine and music. The fact that we tend to experience a match between wine and music does not entail anything about the significance or quality of that experience. However, further research is showing that what we taste and how much we enjoy it are also influenced by what we hear. It has been widely reported that the enjoyment we get from wine is influenced by contextual features of our environment—the price of the wine, the company we keep, the charm or squalor of our surroundings, etc. It would, therefore, not be surprising that music influenced the general level of enjoyment we get from a wine. But, in addition to these general effects, the research is showing that the right music can influence specific aspects of the tasting experience including the perception of sweetness, the level of fruit or other flavor notes, perceived acidity, and level of astingency. In other words, in addition to cross-modal correspondences between taste and sound, there appears to be cross-modal influence. The right music can bring out specific qualities in a wine.

In one study, by British music psychologist Adrian North (discussed by Spence), university students were offered a glass of wine, either a white wine (Chardonnay) or a red wine (Cabernet Sauvignon), and were asked to rate their wines along four dimensions—powerful and heavy, subtle and refined, zingy and refreshing, and mellow and soft. They were then asked to taste their wines while listening to four pieces of music chosen because each exhibited one of these dimensions. Both wines scored significantly higher on the powerful/heavy metric by those who listened to the powerful/heavy music (Orff's Carmina Burana) and the same effect was found with the other dimensions tested. The music had the same effect on both red and white wines and was independent of whether the subjects liked the wine or not.

Other experiments (Spence, et al) suggest that consumers rate wines as tasting better when listening to music that matches the wine, and that a Rachmaninoff piece enhanced the perception of fruit more so than a piece by Debussy (Mean=59.1 vs 51.5) while the Debussy piece seemed to bring out perceived acidity ( Mean=65.3 vs 45.9). Music's effect on other features of wine such as the astringency of tannins and the influence of tempo on the perceived persistence and length of wine have also received some support in the increasingly vast literature on this topic.

What goes with what? You can make pretty good guesses about what will work by learning to be as sensitive to the mood of a wine as to the mood of a piece. Anybody can tell happy music from sad from angry from romantic from lustful. Wines are the same. Cabernets are angry, Pinots romantic, Rieslings cheerful. After that, it's trial and error. Pay particular attention to astringency: the smoothness or harshness a wine displays when tasted in a specific musical environment. You don't need more than a few seconds to sense the effect.

Despite this research there are several questions left unanswered. There are some methodological worries, especially about the possibility of response bias. Are subjects responding to the wine/music matching because they are influenced by the experimenter's expectations? It is unlikely given that the subjects, many initially skeptical, seem genuinely surprised by the results. (Spence discusses these worries here.) But obviously more research testing for this possibility would be helpful.

The big question concerns how these effects happen. What are the causal mechanisms? There is much speculation and several plausible hypotheses but no empirical confirmation. Spence speculates that people find wine more pleasant when the wine/music match is a good one because the match enhances "processing fluency". When music and wine are congruent it's easier to evaluate sensory properties; they become more accessible and the whole experience is perceived as more pleasant.

With regard to how music influences specific properties of the wine, Spence rightly rejects the idea that these phenomena are a form of synaethesia. Subjects are not experiencing the wine as musical but are experiencing the effects of music on their perception of the wine as wine. There are several other hypotheses discussed in the literature, three of which strike me as plausible.

Attentional focus—music may direct our attention to specific properties of the wine thus making those properties of the wine stand out. Since wine is complex and its properties often vague and difficult to discern, music might direct our attention to these vague properties giving them more salience. Certain kinds of music might make us pay more attention to tannins, acidity or fruit. However, it is not known whether music playing in the background would have such effects.

Emotional mediation—we know that listening to music affects our moods and feeling states. It's plausible that such moods influence our perceptions. Spence cites several studies that demonstrate the effect of moods on our sensitivity to olfactory stimulation and taste sensitivities.

Conceptual matching—it may be that particular musical pieces and particular wines may share some common descriptor or metaphorical attribute and the music primes us to perceive that attribute in the wine. Adrian North, one of the experimenters contributing to this literature, endorses this view mentioning especially emotional attributes and connotations such as mellow or heavy.

Of course, these hypotheses are not mutually exclusive and it may be that all three are operating in this relationship between music and wine.

Given that the evidence for this relationship seems secure, what does it mean for our wine tasting practices? For me, wine/music pairing provides a more refined tool for describing a wine. When writing reviews on Edible Arts, I begin by describing the wine as objectively as possible using commonly accepted tasting procedures and wine descriptors as taught by the various wine certification agencies, and under conditions that minimize distractions or environmental influence. But after settling on the basic account of the wine, the music/wine pairing becomes a crucial part of the review. This is because, beyond the aroma descriptors and judgments about intensity, complexity, texture and style, each wine has a temporal development as it evolves on the palate with moments of tension and release, a manner and pace of deploying its energy that plays a crucial role in whether we enjoy a wine or not. But this is precisely how music develops as well with moments of tension and release, amplifications and moments of quiet, and a tempo that establishes the feel of a piece of music. Poets may have the sensibility to describe such things in words. I am no poet. For me, it's much easier to find music with similar resonances to help describe what I'm tasting.

The aforementioned Adrian North, with support from Clark Smith, speculates that wine and music often share metaphorical descriptions that allow us to conceptually fix our impression of a wine, metaphors that often have to do with emotions. As I discussed last month on 3QD, wines, like music, can be light-hearted, tense, or angry. Music makes the often faint emotional intimations of a wine more salient by focusing our attention on them. But even the more technical vocabulary of music theory provides a rich source of metaphor for describing a wine. The way music unfolds is in part dependent on its envelope—the attack, delay, and sustain of a sound. The structural aspects of wine, the impression of fruit, acidity, and tannin, also have attack, delay, and sustain characteristics. Musical concepts such as phrase length, melodic contour (degree of movement up or down), range, consonance and dissonance, number of voices (as in polyphony), and tone quality all have their analogues in the way a wine is structured and develops on the palate.

Consider tone quality for example. The following descriptors common to discussions of musical timbre also apply to wine: brassy, clear, focused or unfocussed, rounded, piercing, strident, harsh, warm, mellow, resonant, dark or bright, heavy or light, and flat just to name a few. Wine of course does not literally possess harmonic differentials that create the distinctive timbre of musical instruments, but music seems particularly amenable to providing metaphorical mappings between its technical vocabulary and wine.

When we step back from analytical tasting and take a broad, synthetic overview of the wine, only metaphor will provide the vocabulary to adequately characterize it. Matching wine and music is a matter of taking all of this complexity into account and finding a piece of music that seems to correspond to as much of it as possible. Of course it is important that this top-down conceptual priming does not disrupt the basic sensory experience of the wine; that is why, for me, the analytical tasting comes first to establish a basic evaluation before turning to the description. In other words, I don't allow the musical correspondence by itself to influence my assessment of the wine, only the full appreciation of it.

Thus, for my purposes both cross-modal correspondence and cross-modal influence are important. All three explanations of the phenomena are at work in creating a match between wine and music. And perceptual similarity seems to play a crucial role in enabling the metaphorical mapping.

What is the purpose of wine/music pairing? Despite the evidence for the correlations between wine and music, one might not care much about whether their tasting experience is enhanced by music. For some tasting purposes, surely enjoyment of the wine is sufficient. But it's important to realize that the wrong music can have detrimental effects on your tasting experience. Play a light-hearted, silly song in the background with your expensive Napa Cab and the experience could be ruined. Given the price of Napa Cabernet that seems like something one would care about. But by the same token, that bottom-shelf bottle of plonk that most of us have to buy to feed our wine habit might taste quite a bit better when enhanced by the right music.

Beyond the enhanced descriptive vocabulary that music lends to wine, the reason to be concerned with wine and music matching is aesthetic. Our experience of a wine is richer when music is allowed to bring out dimensions of the wine that are inconspicuous and less palpable, especially the emotional resonance that wines express. In aesthetics, richness of experience needs no further justification.

Monday, September 11, 2017

Wines of Anger and Joy (Part 2)

by Dwight Furrow

Wine language often suggests that wines express emotion or exhibit personality characteristics despite the fact that wine is not a psychological agent and could not literally possess these characteristics. There is a history, although somewhat in recession today, to refer to wines as aggressive, sensual, fierce, grand, angry, dignified, brooding, joyful, bombastic, tense or calm, etc. Is there a foundation to such talk or is it just arbitrary flights of fancy?

Last month I argued that it's perfectly intelligible to conceive of wine as expressive. Wine expresses the geography and climate of a region or vineyard, the vintage characteristics, and the winemaker's idea of those. More importantly, wine can sometimes express the winemaker's feelings about wine, especially the inspirational experiences that explain their love of wine that they wish to communicate to their patrons. But the aforementioned wine language suggests a broader notion of expression, one in which wine, perhaps like art, can express fundamental features of human experience.

In aesthetics, this question of how art can express feelings has typically been pursued using music as the prime example, because there is a broad consensus that music is deeply connected to human emotion. In trying to answer this question about wine, it makes sense to use these resources developed in the debate about music. So bear with me as I go on about music and the emotions for a bit; wine will get its due towards the end of the essay.

As Jenefer Robinson persuasively argues in her book Deeper than Reason, emotions are a process. They begin with appraisals (sometimes unconscious) of our current situation that are typically accompanied by physiological changes such as an increased heart rate, muscle tension, preparations to act, etc. Some of these appraisals are rapid and instinctual made on the basis of little or no information ("Loud sound, like gun shots! Danger!"). These affective appraisals rapidly focus one's attention, have positive or negative valence and are directed toward an object or situation, but happen too quickly to count as beliefs. Other evaluations become possible as more information is available which modulate the initial, instinctive appraisals. ("The sound came from the TV. No need to panic"). As Robinson explains,

"The emotional response is an automatic and immediate response that initiates motor and autonomic activity and prepares us for possible action. After the initial response cognition kicks in and corroborates or modifies our affective appraisal. And later still we may label our state with an emotion word from our folk psychol­ogy in an attempt to understand what has happened to us. The whole series of events is a process and each element in the process feeds back into and affects its development" (p. 310).

Although individuals may have similar initial appraisals of a given stimulus, our overall emotional response will differ from person to person because, during cognitive monitoring, each of us will relate occurring events to our individual past emotional experiences. Emotions thus rest on reaction patterns that differ from individual to individual but have the same basic structure. In summary, emotions are dynamic processes directed by non-cognitive appraisals, monitored by cognitive evaluations, and constrained by previous experi­ences.

It's easy to see how, in the hands of a talented story-teller, the characters and events in a narrative can be properly arranged to elicit particular non-cognitive appraisals in readers who will respond variously depending on their personal histories and reaction patterns. In Robinson's view, emotions can be embodied in a persona, the characters in the story in the case of literature, which then elicit emotional responses in the reader. Narratives provide us with situations similar enough to real life that we can respond with similar feelings even though the events and characters are in a sense not real.

The puzzle with music (especially music without lyrics to provide narrative context) is that music is an abstract system of sounds, and a musical environment is wholly unlike the natural environment that gives rise to ordinary emotions. How then does music cause these powerful emotional responses that we undeniably have when listening?

There is substantial evidence that music produces physiological effects on the listener by directly affecting the motor system, facial expressions, postures and gestures and even action tendencies like tapping our feet. Some music such as dance music is designed to have that effect. Countless studies show that music listening has an effect on heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, galvanic skin response, etc. Robinson refers to this as the "jazzercise effect". And these studies are supported by subjective reports that music influences moods. Music can startle, surprise, thrill, bewilder, relieve, relax, excite or calm us. As composer and philosopher Leonard Meyer argued, we respond emotionally to the unfolding of musical structure based on our expectations of how that unfolding will proceed. Thus, music expresses some feelings because it directly arouses them in the listener.

Wine can have similar effects although they are far less pronounced than with music. Like music, wine has a temporal structure the unfolding to which we can respond with emotions such as surprise, bewilderment, relief, disappointment, satisfaction, excitement, or relaxation, at least in part independently of the effects of the alcohol. Experienced, knowledgeable wine drinkers have expectations of how a wine's structure should unfold and will respond with all of these basic feeling states which involve initial, affective appraisals of the wine.

But all of this doesn't quite get at the higher order, cognitive emotions that commentators have long attributed to music and to wine. And this is where the controversy heats up. How can music (or wine) express anger or sadness when there is no event to make us angry or sad? Unlike moods and feeling responses such as the startle response, anger, sadness, or fear are laden with cognitive content, with an intentional object and beliefs about that object that are necessary for the emotion to proceed. To feel fear, you must believe that an object is dangerous. The musical environment lacks these fundamental conditions for an emotion; and of course so does wine.

One solution is to simply deny that music expresses such emotions; it only appears to do so. Resemblance theories assert some resemblance between music's dynamic character, the way the music flows, and the dynamic character of people experiencing emotions such as their vocal expression or the contour and attitude of their bodily behavior. On the basis of that resemblance we judge, for example, a sad song to be sad. Down tempo, lugubrious, subdued music in a minor key resembles the contour of someone in the throes of sadness and thus such music is judged to be sad. But just as the sad face of a St. Bernard has nothing to do with the expression of a dog-emotion, the fact that the process of music resembles the process of an emotion does not entail expression since resemblance is a surface phenomenon unrelated to an inward state that is manifested by the expression. It's a trait of the music not of something deeper that the music is expressing.

Partly for this reason, Robinson vehemently rejects resemblance theories arguing instead that a listener imagines a "persona" in the music, which sometimes is the composer, or sometimes a character created by the composer who embodies the complex emotions we attribute to music. Thus sad music is experienced as expressing the sadness of the persona. As a general theory of music's expressiveness this strikes me as implausible. I respond emotionally to a sad song without feeling anything that closely resembles sadness; moreover I do so without imagining a persona that embodies the sadness. To her credit, Robinson does not intend her view to be a general theory, applying only to composers and listeners in the romantic tradition who strive for this kind of transfer of emotion from composer to listener. But for my purposes here, this sort of theory seems utterly inapplicable to wine. I have yet to talk to a wine maker who admits to making wine in order to express anger or sadness. I have tasted wine that makes me angry or sad but that's because the wine is bad, not because it is expressing these emotions.

So how can music or wine express anger or sadness when the cognitive resources needed for complex emotions are missing?

I would argue that music does not typically cause us to experience full blown emotions; rather, we use low-level (largely pre-cognitive) affective appraisals, specifically related to a musical environment, as evidence to construct an interpretation that enables us to hear emotion in the music. That is we imagine how particular emotions could be manifested through these fine-grained, very particular precognitive appraisals and physiological responses unique to a musical environment. Music can directly stir the muscle-tensing, attentionally-focused response that is something like anger in us even though there is nothing to be angry about. For instance, think about a song by Nine Inch Nails played at high volume, with an uptempo, pounding rhythm, with notes played by sharply impacting the instruments, and a simple melody without smooth transitions between the notes. Such music would be instinctively appraised as aggressive and produce feeling states typical of such music, even without howling vocals and lyrics depicting aggression. We might be drawn to the music, find it attention grabbing and thoroughly enjoyable but at the same time feel the anxiety, muscle tension, and action tendencies that in the "real world" would constitute an urge to strike out or flee in response to aggression. In other words, the valences we experience in a musical environment are not simple positive or negative states but very complex mixtures that might be attractive and interesting at one level and repulsive and disruptive at another. The appraisal structures of musically-induced feelings are not identical to the appraisal structure of anger since there is nothing to be angry about. But they can easily be interpreted as angry. It is literally true that the music is aggressive because we feel the aggression. It can plausibly be interpreted as angry because it shares the aggressive dimension with a certain kind of anger.

Similarly, when I listen to Samuel Barber's Adagio, my feeling state seems to retard and slowly swell following the contours of the music. It settles into a calm place becoming reflective but with tension around the edges, then swells in volume and breadth until it reaches a kind of heightened yet brittle intensity, disrupting the reflective mood, and then it induces a temporary relief as it seeks that calm place again but always with a sense of quiet distress. These feeling states are what the music directly expresses and are unique to a musical environment. What is the best interpretation of these feeling states in seeking a label from ordinary emotions? They add up to something more particular than a generic sadness, yet the intensity and surging volume is incompatible with an emotion such as melancholy. The closest I can come in assigning a familiar label to Adagio is that it expresses feelings associated with grief, although the experience is in many respects utterly unlike genuine grief. This is largely a matter of interpretation and hypothesis testing, a highly cognitive task in which I cast about for the name of some general feeling state that roughly captures the very particular feeling state induced by the music.

In these two examples, the music is genuinely expressive because the music arouses genuine feelings. But these feeling states are only roughly analogous to full scale emotions, and the labeling of the music as expressing emotions of grief or anger are tenuous, subject to disagreement as different listeners will interpret the clues differently, and optional as one could decline to engage in such labeling at all. Nevertheless, some interpretations are ruled out; Adagio could not be interpreted as angry because a typical affective response would lack the underlying feelings associated with anger. And the interpretation is not a mere projection since it is based on evidence provided by feeling states directly aroused by the music.

Something similar happens with wine although, as I mentioned above, wine has significantly less ability to induce these highly variable physiological responses. Wine has a temporally extended structure and is therefore in process much like music and emotion. Changes in that structure induce very particular feeling states although they are subtle and unfold more quickly than is typical either of emotions or musical passages. Like music, a wine, as tasted, is a process that might first appear bold or be more reserved, gather momentum or seek repose, and then slowly diminish or reach a crescendo. It might be energetic, become lush and enveloping, and then turn aggressive, or be chilly and austere before releasing ebullient fruit notes. All of these changes induce affective appraisals, feeling states responding to degrees of complexity and novelty, of being surprised, or confused, of being drawn to or repelled in a complex mix of valences, and involving feelings of anticipation and resolution, all influenced by expectations and how the wine meets or does not meet them. We might call these appraisals of interest, appraisals of preference, and epistemological appraisals.

But wine also induces affective states not directly related to attention, pleasure or cognition. We feel as if we're floating, being whipsawed, attacked or caressed by particular wines. Aggressive wines are not just perceived as aggressive but are felt that way—we have to steel ourselves to appreciate them, are irritated by them but feel richly satisfied when they achieve resolution. Wines that are heavy, dense and mysterious are not just perceived as brooding but are felt to induce reflection on something that seems vaguely menacing although there is of course nothing menacing in our environment. By contrast, wines that are bright and fresh induce a vague sense of ebullience and light-heartedness. On the basis of these pre-cognitive appraisals and physiological responses we judge a wine to be angry or joyful or specify a more complex array of emotions just as a piece of music might embody several emotions.

As with music, judgments about which complex, named emotions to attribute to wine will vary from person to person but are not arbitrary because they are constrained by the features of the wine and those aspects of our emotional lives that are widely shared. Someone who calls a delicate, floral, light- bodied Pinot Noir angry doesn't understand "angry" or lacks the experience with wine to discern its features.

A skeptic might object to my argument here that these affective states induced by wine are really just perceptions. We perceive in the wine properties related to human emotion but they are independent of any affective states we might experience. Indeed, I think they are perceptions, but perceptions are laden with affect. We can analytically distinguish perception and feeling but in life perception and feeling are fundamentally linked.

It is of course true that to be so affected by wine one has to make oneself available to these feeling states and develop the perceptual competence to discern them. The features of wine are subtle and one has to seek them out. But that is true of music as well. We can hear Barber's Adagio while feeling nothing. But that is a diminished form of appreciation.

Which brings me to perhaps the most important issue—why do this? Why attribute emotional expression to wine? There can be only one answer. It provides us with a richer aesthetic experience, which of course is the point of consuming wine reflectively. Wine consumption serves many purposes but aesthetic enjoyment is its primary function. All of this suggests that our current habit of analytical tasting needs a reboot. Picking out flavor notes is a helpful starting point for appreciating a wine but we don't drink wine to smell blackberries just as we don't view (most) paintings to experience a shade of blue. A wine leaves an overall aesthetic impression, it evokes feelings, moves us, stimulates the imagination, invokes memories, even makes us think. And different wines have different ways of doing so. If wine writing is to reach a higher level it must capture that broader aesthetic experience.

Nevertheless, it's worth repeating that both music and narrative are more efficient at inducing affective states than is wine. Responding with feeling to music and narrative is instinctive. Although learning is involved, it is learning that is readily available to almost everyone. Our world view is structured by narrative and, as noted, music powerfully influences physiological states. Thus, everyday experience is infused with the affective experiences afforded by both.

By contrast, wine is less distinct and its appreciation more ephemeral. In fact, affective responses to wine are akin to affective responses to non-representational art, which requires focused attention on something that is not part of everyday experience and requires some knowledge and training to appreciate. (This is why I find that, by pairing wine and music, the expressive features of wine can be made more available. More on that next month.)

Yet wine's vagueness is no argument against its expressiveness. If wine is indeed "bottled poetry", as many have claimed, then it might share poetry's mystery—as E.B. White said "A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring."

Monday, August 14, 2017

Wines of Anger and Joy (Part 1)

by Dwight Furrow

Can we make sense of the idea that wines express emotion?

No doubt wine can trigger feelings. Notoriously, at a party, wine triggers feelings of conviviality via the effects of alcohol. But the wine isn't expressing anything in that case. It's the people via their mannerisms and interaction encouraged by the wine that are expressing feelings of conviviality. The wine is a causal mechanism, not itself an expression of these feelings.

The concept of expression need not be restricted to feelings. To express is to externalize an inward state. In a very straightforward sense some wines express the nature of the grapes in a particular vintage and the soils and climate of the vineyard. But for better or worse, in aesthetics, we tend to be more interested in the expression of psychological agents rather than pieces of fruit. Perhaps that is a mere prejudice, but one we are unlikely to dispense with given the importance of human emotions to our sensibility. If wines are expressive in the sense that is of interest in aesthetics, it will be because they express some human quality.

Of course a wine expresses the winemaker's idea of what the grapes of a particular vintage and location should taste like. But that is an idea, not a feeling or emotion, and at least historically, the concept of expression in aesthetics has focused on feelings as the central case. Thus, although wine expresses ideas and nature, it will be via emotion that it earns any expressivist credentials.

The most discussed expression theory was formulated by the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and we can begin to unravel the sense in which wine expresses feelings by considering his theory. While implausible as a general theory of artistic expression, Tolstoy's "transmission" theory has the virtue of being an intuitively plausible account of how some works of art express emotion, and I think it directly applies to at least some wines.

According to Tolstoy, a work of art expresses emotion when an artist feels an emotion and embodies that emotion in a work of art in a way that successfully transmits that emotion to the audience who then feel the same emotion as the artist. Thus, for example, a composer might intend to express sadness via her music using a minor key and lugubrious rhythm. If the audience then feels sad as a result of hearing the composition, the work is successful as an expression of sadness, according to Tolstoy's theory.

Some winemakers are trying to capture for their clientele their own feelings of awe and wonder experienced when they first discovered the beauty of wine. Many winemakers talk about being inspired by a trip to France or Italy where they encountered a particular flavor experience to which they had an emotional response, and they seek to transmit that feeling to their clientele via their own wines. Just as a smile expresses the presence of joy, or a piece of music in a minor key expresses sadness as intended by a composer, a winemaker can intend that her wines evoke an emotive response of awe and wonder.

Tolstoy's theory has its problems as a general theory of emotional expression in the arts. The requirement that the artist feel the same emotion she is transmitting is too strong as is the claim that a successful sad composition must make the audience feel sad. Counter-examples abound. But as an account of one way in which emotional expression occurs, it is a useful theory and illuminates one way in which wine can express emotion.

However, Tolstoy's idea of "transmission" does not exhaust the ways in which an object might express an emotion. "Expression" sometimes refers to how something looks or sounds without their being anyone in the emotional state expressed by the work. Consider for instance the sense in which a fog-shrouded lake is gloomy or a melody is ominous. We attribute gloom to the lake because of the way it looks regardless of whether it makes us feel gloomy; a melody is ominous because of the way it sounds without the audience feeling a sense of impending doom.

We seem to have a natural, perhaps unavoidable, tendency to attribute human feeling states to non-sentient objects. In the case of the fog-shrouded lake there is no artist imbuing the lake with gloomy features. Rather the perceiver is projecting gloominess onto the lake. In the case of the ominous melody it was of course the composer or songwriter who conceived the melody, but we might still project an ominous feeling onto the melody independently of whether the composer intended that and without the listener herself feeling gloomy.

With regard to wine, perhaps the most universally projected feelings have to do with romance. Throughout its history, wine has not only been a symbol of romance, but a symbol with the power to induce feelings and express them as well. Voluptuous fruit, seductive aromas, silky textures, and a languid evolution can induce feelings and heightened sensory awareness akin to the felt allure of a romantic encounter. It is both a cause of those feelings and an expression of them since the wine exemplifies the properties it is symbolizing. It's not just the alcohol having this effect since other alcoholic beverages lack that association with romance. I argued above that wine through its alcoholic effects induces feelings of conviviality. But in doing so it acquires symbolic significance, exemplifying sociability and good cheer, and thus becomes an expression of conviviality as well.

If wine were able to express only feelings of conviviality and romance, its range as an expressive medium would be rather limited. Can wine legitimately express a wider range of feelings? Although it has fallen out of favor in recent years as wine language has become more technical and analytic, if you look at tasting notes from the not too distant past, there is some basis for attributing a wider range of emotional expressiveness to wines. Wines can be lively, dark, austere, fun, aggressive, sensual, luxuriant, fierce, muddled or unfocused, grandiose, angry, dignified, brooding, explosive, amiable, joyful, bombastic, calm, languid, carefree, feral, provocative, reflective, somber, tender, tense, or visceral. All of these suggest the taster perceives feeling or mood states in the wine via some kind of projection. And of course we can project personality or behavioral traits onto wine as well such as shy, reserved, or ebullient.

Is there a rational basis for these attributions? And should they be a central element in descriptions of wine? Or Is such projection subjective fantasy having little to do with the wine itself? With regard to gloomy landscapes and ominous melodies, if subjects were exposed to them and we were to take a poll, I suspect there would be widespread agreement about the appropriateness of these descriptors. Furthermore, it is widely assumed, with some limited evidence, that horizontal lines in a painting evoke feelings of serenity while vertical lines suggest striving and aspiration. Certain colors are thought to have emotional significance as well, with red associated with aggression, and yellow the color of happiness. Might the features of wine have similar associations?

Wine is a vague object, its features not as clearly discernible as fog over a lake or the contours of a melody. The features that make a wine angry might be thick, aggressive tannins, high alcohol, and searing acidity supporting bold, dark fruit—some Cabernet Sauvignon is best described as angry, especially if it hasn't had time to age in the bottle. Without some understanding of what counts as aggressive acidity and grainy tannins the perception of anger might not be available. But the fact that perception requires training or familiarity does not preclude it being a genuine expression.

No doubt perceiving emotion in non-psychological objects is an imaginative process. I suppose we can project anything onto anything. Someone could view a fog-shrouded lake as cheerful or that ominous melody as lighthearted. But that projection is unlikely to be successful either as a description for others to enjoy or as a repeatable projection that would seem appropriate again and again. For such a projection to be sustainable there must be some relationship between the way something looks or sounds and the feeling state being projected. Thus, although the attribution is a projection of a subject it is constrained by the features the object is perceived to possess.

But this brings us to one of the knottier issues in aesthetics: What is the relationship between the perceived emotion and the features of an object (music, a painting, or wine) that anchor the projection? This issue is usually addressed in the philosophy of music because similar issues arise in describing a piece of music as, for instance, sad despite the fact that the music need not induce sadness in anyone. What justifies attributing sadness to the music? Our understanding of wine and emotion would profit from a comparison with the current state of this debate in music.

The main theories on offer are:

The aforementioned arousal theory which has contemporary versions more sophisticated than Tolstoy's discussed above. The basic idea is that there are basic, non-cognitive feeling states in the listener caused by the music that anchor and make appropriate our more complex attributions of emotions such as anger or sadness;

Resemblance theories which assert some resemblance between music's dynamic character and the dynamic character of people experiencing emotions such as their vocal expression or the contour of their bodily behavior; and

Theories of metaphor which assert that projections of emotion onto music are a matter of mapping relations from one domain (experienced emotions) onto relations in another domain (the experience of music).

My view regarding music is that all three are correct. All identify a phenomenologically plausible account of how music expresses emotion and we deploy all three when experiencing the rich connections between music and emotion. But do they apply to wine as well? Wine is less obviously expressive of emotion than music. Almost everyone experiences music as emotionally expressive; most people drink wine without ever making the connection to emotion. That suggests a more tenuous relation between wine and emotion although as I noted above seeing the connection may require training or perhaps the emergence of a social convention and practice devoted to it.

But settling this question would require a careful mapping of features of wine and features of emotion, a task strangely inhibited by this decidedly tranquil bottle of Cabernet sitting before me persuading me to put off the analysis until next month.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Optimizing Ourselves into Oblivion

by Jalees Rehman

The short story "Anekdote zur Senkung der Arbeitsmoral" ("An anecdote about the lowering of work ethic") is one of the most famous stories written by the German author Heinrich Böll. In the story, an affluent tourist encounters a poorly clad fisherman who is comfortably napping in his boat. The assiduous tourist accidentally wakes up the fisherman while taking photos of the peaceful scenery – blue sky, green sea, fisherman with an old-fashioned hat – but then goes on to engage the lounging fisherman in a conversation. The friendly chat gradually turns into a sermon in which the tourist lectures the fisherman about how much more work he could be doing, how he could haul in more fish instead of lazing about, use the profits to make strategic investments, perhaps even hire employees and buy bigger boats in a few years. To what end, the fisherman asks. So that you could peacefully doze away at the beach, enjoying the beautiful sun without any worries, responds the enthusiastic tourist.

I remembered Böll's story which was written in the 1960s – during the post-war economic miracle years (Wirtschaftswunder) when prosperity, efficiency and growth had become the hallmarks of modern Germany – while recently reading the book "Du sollst nicht funktionieren" ("You were not meant to function") by the German author and philosopher Ariadne von Schirach. In this book, von Schirach criticizes the contemporary obsession with Selbstoptimierung (self-optimization), a term that has been borrowed from network theory and computer science where it describes systems which continuously adapt and "learn" in order to optimize their function. Selbstoptimierung is now used in a much broader sense in German culture and refers to the desire of individuals to continuously "optimize" their bodies and lives with the help of work-out regimens, diets, self-help courses and other processes. Self-optimization is a routine learning process that we all engage in. Successful learning of a new language, for example, requires continuous feedback and improvement. However, it is the continuous self-optimization as the ultimate purpose of life, instead of merely serving as a means to an end that worries von Schirach.

She draws on many examples from Körperkult (body-cult), a slavish worship of the body that gradually replaces sensual pleasure with the purpose of discipling the body. Regular exercise and maintaining a normal weight are key factors for maintaining health but some individuals become so focused on tracking steps and sleep duration on their actigraphs, exercising or agonizing about their diets that the initial health-related goals become lose their relevance. They strive for a certain body image and resting heart rates and to reach these goals they indulge in self-discipline to maximize physical activity and curb appetite. Such individuals rarely solicit scientific information as to the actual health benefits of their exercise and food regimens and might be surprised to learn that more exercise and more diets do not necessarily lead to more health. The American Heart Association recommends roughly 30-45 minutes of physical activity daily to reduce high blood pressure and the risk of heart attacks and stroke. Even simple and straightforward walking is sufficient to meet these goals, there is no need for two-hour gym work-outs.

Why are we becoming so obsessed with self-optimization? Unfortunately, von Schirach's analysis degenerates into a diffuse diatribe against so many different elements of contemporary culture. Capitalist ideology, a rise in narcissism and egotism, industrialization and the growing technocracy, consumerism, fear of death, greed, monetization of our lives and social media are among some of the putative culprits that she invokes. It is quite likely that many of these factors play some role in the emerging pervasiveness of the self-optimization culture – not only in Germany. However, it may be useful to analyze some of the root causes and distinguish them from facilitators. Capitalist ideology is very conducive to a self-optimization culture. Creating beauty and fitness targets as well as laying out timelines to achieve these targets is analogous to developing corporate goals, strategies and milestones. Furthermore, many corporations profit from our obsession with self-optimization. Companies routinely market weight regimens, diets, exercise programs, beauty products and many other goods or services that generate huge profits if millions of potential consumers buy into the importance of life-long self-optimization. They can set the parameters for self-optimization – ideal body images – and we just obey. According to the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, such a diffusion of market logic and obedience to pre-ordained parameters and milestones into our day-to-day lives results in an achievement society which ultimately leads to mental fatigue and burnout. In the case of "working out", it is telling that a supposedly leisure physical activity uses the expression "work", perhaps reminding us that the mindset of work persists during the exercise period.

But why would we voluntarily accept these milestones and parameters set by others? One explanation that is not really addressed by von Schirach is that obsessive self-optimization with a focus on our body may represent a retreat from the world in which we feel disempowered. Those of us who belong to the 99% know that our voices are rarely heard or respected when it comes to most fundamental issues in society such as socioeconomic inequality, rising intolerance and other forms of discrimination or prejudice. When it comes to our bodies, we may have a sense of control and empowerment that we do not experience in our work or societal roles. Self-discipline of our body gives our life a purpose with tangible goals such as lose x pounds, exercise y hours, reduce your resting heart rate by z.

Self-optimization may be a form of Ersatzempowerment but it comes at a great cost. As we begin to retreat from more fundamental societal issues and instead focus on controlling our bodies, we also gradually begin to lose the ability to dissent and question the meaning of actions. Working-out and dieting are all about How, When and What – how do I lose weight, what are my goals, when am I going to achieve it. The most fundamental questions of our lives usually focus on the Why – but self-optimization obsesses so much about How, When and What that one rarely asks "Why am I doing this?" Yet it is the Why that gives our life meaning, and self-optimization perhaps illustrates how a purpose-driven life may lose its meaning. The fisherman prompted the tourist to think about the Why in Böll's story and perhaps we should do the same to avoid the trap of an obsessive self-optimization culture.

How to Drink Wine

by Dwight Furrow

The wine world is never short on controversy. Among the most persistent are worries about how wine quality is assessed. Are scores the best way of assessing quality? Why do I disagree with wine critics so much? Why do price and quality often seem unrelated? Are cult wines worth their cost? And what about those florid tasting notes and esoteric descriptors wine critics use that seem to have nothing to do with what I taste?

We need some distinctions to sort out these issues.

Begin by distinguishing two distinct objects of evaluation.* First, there is the process by which we become aware of the aesthetic properties of the wine. This is the process of appreciation, and the object of attention is an experience which is of course guided by the wine. Secondly, instead of evaluating the experience of wine, we could evaluate the wine itself. This might sound odd. How can I gain access to a wine without experiencing it? And indeed, sometimes there would be no difference between my evaluation of the experience and my evaluation of the wine. However, sometimes there is an important difference because each is focused on a different kind of value. When we focus on evaluating an experience we are focused on intrinsic value, the value of an experience independently of how it is used or for what purpose. We enjoy experiences not because they are useful for some purpose but because they are good in themselves. By contrast, we can evaluate a wine for its instrumental value in causing our experience. Wine is good if it brings about an experience that we enjoy.

Here is why this is an important distinction, although I will use something less esoteric than wine as an example. Most of us value cars because they get us where we want to go. Some people value cars because they are fast and can win a race. In both cases the value of the car is instrumental and there are reasonably objective criteria for evaluating cars as a means of transportation. But some people value cars because they like to drive them or look at them. This is also instrumental value but in these cases the car is useful at causing an aesthetic experience.

So the phrase "aesthetic value" can refer to either of two things. It can refer to the instrumental value that adheres to public objects like cars, works of art, wine etc. and their ability to cause an aesthetic experience. Or it can refer to the non-instrumental, intrinsic value caused by the object, my experience itself, which of course is subjective since only I have access to my own experience. The key point here is that we can assess the instrumental value of things if we know their purpose even though we don't care about that purpose. I don't care about the aesthetic value of cars but some people do. As long as I understand the aesthetic properties cars exhibit, I can assign aesthetic value to them even though they don't have that value to me. My experience of a cherried-out "57" Chevy leaves me uninspired but I can nevertheless assess its instrumental value at causing an aesthetic experience when compared to other cars.

Like cars, wine has instrumental value. It can be used as an alcohol delivery system, for greasing the social wheels at a party, or as a prop in a film about upper class ennui, and we can evaluate a wine for how it performs those functions. But we can also value wine just because it provides an experience that we value for its own sake. In this case, the wine has instrumental value. Assuming I know and can discern the properties of a good wine, I can evaluate it for its ability to produce an aesthetic experience even if I don't care for it. This is what competent critics are adept at doing.

Of course, most people don't assess wine in that way. Except under unusual circumstances only wine critics bother to positively assess wines they don't prefer. That is because most of us when we drink wine are interested in the experience; the wine is necessary for the experience but it's the experience that matters. When we assess our experience we're focused on intrinsic value, the value of the experience itself independently of any purpose it might serve. Or, to put this point differently, for anyone other than critics it is really appreciation rather than evaluation that takes priority. Appreciation is focused on intrinsic value because appreciation has as its object an experience, and experiences have intrinsic value. And appreciation is subjective at least in the sense that the experience is my own. It belongs to me and no one else.

Appreciation and evaluation play by quite different rules. Appreciation focuses on a specific experience, what you are experiencing right now. And appreciation is not fundamentally comparative. You can enjoy a particular wine for its aesthetic properties without explicitly comparing it to other wines. More importantly, an appreciative experience is open to every aspect of the experience, a process of discovery rather than critique or justification. It requires a heightened sensitivity to the wine experience which can be positive, negative or involve aspects of both.

By contrast, evaluation abstracts from any particular experience. It looks at many experiences over time, and assigns instrumental value to the object responsible for those experiences. In other words, evaluation asks the question how good is this wine at producing a positive aesthetic experience when compared to other wines. An evaluation assigns instrumental value to a wine by concentrating on features that should stand out to any competent taster—complexity, intensity, depth, balance, etc.

Thus, evaluation requires general criteria that contribute to repeatable elements of the experience that are unlikely to change from circumstance to circumstance. When we evaluate, we arrive at conclusions about a wine by referring to criteria that can be specified in advance about the kind of thing we are evaluating. With regard to wine that involves judging whether the wine is characteristic of its varietal and region.

And in principle, we can formulate reasons to praise or condemn a wine without experiencing it first hand. If someone were to report accurately that a wine lacks complexity or tastes thin and watery that would be reason to condemn it without tasting it.

By contrast, appreciation is open to discovery because there is no prior decision to stay within boundaries that can be specified in advance of experiencing the wine. Appreciation requires competence just as evaluation does but only as a skill, not as a set of fully articulated criteria. Knowing what features a particular wine should have given its varietal, region, and style might call our attention to features that frame our expectations about a wine. But appreciation, instead of judging the presence of qualities we anticipate, aims at discovering whatever is to be found in experiencing a particular work—standard and non-standard, good or bad. Wine writers often perform the mantra "drink what you like" but that captures only a very small part of the appreciative wine experience.

With evaluation, the absence of a standard feature yields a negative evaluation. With appreciation, the absence of a standard feature can be a positive property. A Chianti that lacks high acidity might be negatively evaluated as a Chianti. But that lack of acidity might be interesting and revealing as an aesthetic experience. However, appreciating a specific wine does not rule out interest in it as a kind of thing or an instance of a genre. I can bring my knowledge of the tradition and conventions within which the wine is intended to be understood to aid in appreciation. Much of my appreciation of that under- acidified Chianti stems from its subversion of my expectations of Chianti. So in appreciation we have expectations but we don't judge in relation to those expectations.

In summary, appreciation differs from evaluation in that they have different goals and focus on different properties. The goal of appreciation is to savor what is there and to discover the various kinds of experiences on offer. The goal of evaluation is to render a verdict and assign the wine a ranking. Appreciation focuses on all the properties available in an experience while evaluation focuses on the properties specified in advance as markers of quality.

The aforementioned controversies in the wine world are often the result of conflating these two quite distinct activities. From this analysis it's easy to see how the judgments of critics and consumers might diverge. The primary job of a wine critic is evaluation. Wine critics are telling you something important about the wine—its instrumental value for the drinking public when compared to other wines in its comparison class. What they can't do is assess your experience. Only you can do that. This doesn't mean they are wrong or full of baloney when their judgment doesn't conform to your judgment. It means they are focused on instrumental value while the wine consumer typically is focused on the intrinsic value of her experience. (Consumers and critics can of course switch roles. Nothing precludes the consumer from playing amateur critic or the critic from appreciation her experience.)

We value wine for diverse reasons and applying a set of fixed criteria, as the critic, does will not be sensitive to that diversity. A wine that is great in one context will be dreadful in another. But wine criticism by necessity abstracts from this and looks at wine in a generic context, assessing its instrumental value in producing aesthetic experience to a broad spectrum of individuals under ideal conditions. Thus, just as critics should avoid leaping from the conclusion that a wine is instrumentally valuable to the conclusion that anyone who tastes it in any context will find it pleasing, consumers should not expect a judgment about the instrumental value of a wine to conform to their personal taste preferences.

Regarding the lack of coherence between price and quality the most important factor has nothing to do with tasting. Price reflects supply and demand not intrinsic quality; the cult wine phenomenon is in part a function of restricting supply while using strategic marketing to ramp up demand and with it the price. But this doesn't quite explain why connoisseurs, if they are neither investors nor easily fooled by marketing, flock to these wines. Putting aside explanations such as following fashion and showing off which surely explains some of their popularity, another factor is that at least some so-called cult wines are distinctive. They provide a taste experience different from their competition and are for that reason highly valued. But distinctiveness is not easily assessed using standard criteria such as complexity, intensity, or depth and is not well captured via a ranking. In other words, recognizing distinctiveness or uniqueness requires an appreciative stance along with skill at comparison. Since the object of evaluation is in part the experience of distinctiveness which itself has a kind of intrinsic value there will be a good deal of subjectivity to these judgments about what is distinctive and how worthy that distinction is. At this level of highest quality, assessment hovers uncertainly between instrumental and intrinsic value as its aim and thus involves both objective assessment and subjective appreciation. This is why wine critics can disagree vehemently about these wines—the value of that distinctiveness does depend on personal taste.

And finally, regarding the florid tasting notes and unusual descriptors often found in wine criticism, these are attempts to describe the distinctiveness that some high quality wines exhibit. In other words, the tasting note is in part an attempt to capture the experience of appreciation. Thus, they are inherently subjective since they aim to describe an experience. I suppose some might argue that wine critics should stick to an assessment of instrumental value and avoid describing their experience. But that is unnecessarily restrictive and opposed to criticism in music, film or literature all which include some information about the critic's (hopefully well informed) personal reaction.

If criticism is treated not as answering the question what should I drink but as answering the question what is there about this wine that is interesting, these controversies about objectivity are mitigated. There is room for objective assessment as well as subjective appreciation. Both are central to the wine experience. When subjective elements having to do with a critic's personal preferences enter the picture in the description of the wine that's a good thing. It's doing what all good writing should do—providing a window into someone else's experience, giving you information from a different point of view perhaps one that you don't share.

What criticism is not doing is assessing your experience.

But that conclusion must include a caveat, which requires that we introduce one more object of criticism. The third thing we might evaluate in addition to a wine or an experience is the cultural significance of the wine or perhaps the people who drink it. We can evaluate the preferences of individuals or groups and the cultural implications of those preferences. Aesthetically evaluating a specific wine is a different project than evaluating whether it is good for society or not, and the latter evaluation requires a significant shift in perspective. Judging a particular wine involves accepting the conventions of the established categories in which the wine fits, appreciating it as the kind of thing it is, thereby enabling comparative rankings. But when evaluating trends in wine culture we might be looking at the aesthetic consequences of a trend that challenge those conventions.

A few years ago, critics, somms, and some winemakers began to disparage high alcohol wines for their lack of finesse and nuance. Such judgments are thoroughly aesthetic but have as their object neither one's personal experience nor the instrumental value of a wine but a kind of taste preference in general. This begins as an appreciative judgment about one's personal experience but shifts to a cultural perspective. Today, many of us argue that the current trend toward consolidation in the wine industry with small producers being swallowed by multi-national corporations has negative consequences for wine culture generally. This judgment is partly aesthetic since wines made by large corporate entities tend to be less distinctive and the personal, intimate aspects of wine culture are diminished. But there are moral and economic arguments that come into play as well that are not fundamentally aesthetic.

Again, it is important to distinguish the object of evaluation. You can have a perfectly fine appreciative experience of an industrially-made wine while condemning its social consequences or larger aesthetic impact because the object of evaluation and type of value are distinct—one is the evaluation of an experience, the other an evaluation of a set of preferences on the wine community as a whole.

Debates in the wine world tend to generate more heat than light because we fail to attend to the object and kind of value being evaluated.

*These distinctions in aesthetic judgment have been deeply informed by Theodore Gracyk's analysis, especially in his book Listening to Popular Music.

Monday, March 20, 2017

The Chickening of America, or Why We Don't Eat Fish (But Could Eat More)

by Carol A Westbrook

It's Lent. For many people, that means you have to deprive yourself of food that you like to eat, and instead punish yourself by eating fish. In actuality, you are not required to eat fish during the forty days of Lent, devout Catholics and other Christians are only required to abstain from meat on Lenten Fridays. Fish is merely a protein can be conveniently substituted for the missing meat course--or you can eat eggs, cheese, pizza or eggplant Parmesan instead.

Yet some people are so unused to eating fish that when it appears in their diets it is memorable. Eating fish means "Lent." And they hate it.

During Lent we "try" to eat fish, and for many, McDonald's Filet-O-Fish is the answer. The company sells nearly a quarter its filling, 390-calorie sandwiches during the six-week Lenten season. Although it contains wild-caught Alaskan Pollock, the sandwich contains only 2.8 oz. this fish (as I calculated from the protein content provided in McDonald's online nutritional information). Since 2.8 g of Alaskan Pollock has only 73 calories and 0.8 g of fat, the Filet-O-Fish's 390 calories and 18.2 g of fat can only be attributed to the bread, tartar sauce, and melted cheese.

I don't eat Filet-O-Fish because I honestly like fish a great deal more than I like bread, tartar sauce and melted cheese. Truly, I love fish. I love eating it in any way, shape or form -- from smoked and pickled, to raw, fried, steamed and everything between. For example, while vacationing in Martinique, I had a plate of whole fried ballaboo, a local reef fish with a cute pointy nose that was meant to be eaten whole after deep-frying, sans pointy nose. Yum! (See the picture on the right). But most Americans don't share my passion, they hate fish.

Yes, it is true. Americans don't like to eat fish. The per-capita consumption of seafood in this country is remarkably low--on average, we consume only about 15 pounds per person per year, while the per-capita consumption of egg, chicken, beef and pork, at 195 pounds, is about 13 times higher! This is paltry compared to European fish consumption, 54 pounds per person per year. Even land-locked Switzerland consumes about 35 pounds per person per year. Of those 15 pounds of fish, only about 10 pounds is fin fish (the rest is shrimp).

Ten pounds of fish means only two meager 6-ounce fish meals each month, or one Filet-O-Fish per week. Fifteen pounds per person per year. That's a total of 4.5 million pounds of seafood, in a country where our yearly harvest is 11 billion pounds, both fished (9.5 billion pounds) and farmed (662 million pounds). The US is the fifth largest producer of seafood in the world, and we export almost all of it. Ironically, for all of this abundance of seafood, most of the fish we eat is imported! Yes, it's true--we buy back our own fish from countries like China that purchase it, clean and bone it, process it to individual portions, re-freeze it, and sell it back to us.

My purpose is not to convince you to eat fish; I know that's impossible. I'm just trying to understand why the average American doesn't like fish. There is no biologic reason; unlike bitter foods, or cabbagey foods like brocolli, there is no specific taste receptor that might get triggered. When I ask Google why people don't like fish, I only get a lot of blogs saying things like, "Eww. Fish is so disgusting." "It's smelly." "It's scary, it will make me sick." "I don't know how to cook it" "I have to dissect it to eat it." "I don't want to look at the eyes." You get the picture. The aversion is cultural, it is learned, it is ingrained.

There are people who aren't averse to fish, but even those Americans prefer to eat a bland lump of an overcooked, tasteless white or pink food than delight in the culinary experience of a freshly-caught piece of fish, cooked to the proper degree of doneness, and lightly seasoned. Now that I think about it, Americans prefer to see all of their animal-based food as a bland lump, rather than appearing as it really is: a piece of meat with bones, skin, sinews and organs. The model for the ideal food is a boneless, skinless chicken breast. This is what I mean by "The Chickening of America." Don't believe me? You may recall that in the 90's the National Pork Council had a campaign to get people to buy more pork by touting it as "The other white meat." It succeeded.

Try this experiment. Walk through a supermarket and look for a bone-in pork chop, a bone-in beef or pork shoulder roast, and a ham that isn't semi-boneless and spiral sliced. Chances are you can't find all three. In some supermarkets it's even hard to find a whole chicken, though you can still buy drumsticks and wings that have bones. Thanksgiving may be the only time where we ever sacrifice a whole animal for a meal, but even then we buy one that has been cleaned, dressed, and injected with marinade.

And that's not all. These lumps of homogeneous mystery meat taste so bland that now we need to make them more palatable by covering them with seasoning and sauces, adding back as much saturated fat, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar, and salt as possible, thereby swamping any nutritional value the meat might possible have. Or we'll take the tasteless lump and serve it smothered in sauces, gravy, melted cheese and saturated fat... Or we cover it in batter and deep fry. Have a hankering for a whole lobster? Red Lobster restaurants push the cheesy lobster casserole or skewered lobster meat instead. If you insist on a cooked whole lobster they will plate if for you after they have conveniently remove the offensive anatomic parts (the tasty tomales and roe) and pulled the meat out of its shell to save you the trouble of having to dissect it. (pix mystery meat)

So what's the problem with fish? Why can't we just eat more even it we have to manipulate and disguise it? We don't because no matter how we disguise it, what remains is still the idea of fish--fishy smell, scales, fins and, well, anatomy.Yuck. It may look like chicken but, as Helene York wrote in The Atlantic, Nov 13, 2012, "Despite how it's marketed, most seafood doesn't taste like chicken."

Monday, February 27, 2017

Reality Check: Wine, Subjectivism and the Fate of Civilization

by Dwight Furrow

I must confess to having once been an olfactory oaf. In my early days as a wine lover, I would plunge my nose into a glass of Cabernet, sniffing about for a hint of cassis or eucalyptus only to discover a blast of alcohol thwarting my ascension to the aroma heaven promised in the tasting notes. A sense of missed opportunity was especially acute when the wine was described as "sexy, flamboyant, with a bounteous body." Disappointed but undaunted, I would hurry off to wine tastings hoping the reflected brilliance of a wine expert might inspire epithelial fitness. It was small comfort when the expert would try to soften my disappointment with the banality, "it's all subjective anyway." So one evening, while receiving instruction in the finer points of wine tasting from a charming but newly minted sommelier, I let frustration get the better of me and blurted "Well, if it's all subjective, what the hell are we doing here? Is it just your personal opinion that there is cassis in the cab or is it really there. We all have opinions. If you're an expert you should be giving us your knowledge, not your opinion!" Someone muttered something about "chill out" and it was quickly decided that my glass needed refilling. But the point stands. The idea of expertise involves the skillful apprehension of facts. If there is no fact about aromas of cassis in that cab there is no expertise at discerning it.

These conversations over a glass of wine are more pleasant (because of the wine) but structurally similar to the semester-long task of getting my college students to realize that moral beliefs are not arbitrary emendations of their lightly held personal attitudes but are rooted in our need to survive and flourish as social beings. Yet even after weeks of listening to me going on about the sources of value they still write term papers confidently asserting that with regard to "right" and "wrong", eh, who knows?

Subjectivism, the view that a belief is made true by my subjective attitude towards it, has long been the default belief of freshman students and arbiters of taste. Unfortunately this tendency to treat it as the wisdom of the ages has escaped the confines of the wine bar and classroom into the larger society. Buoyed by the cheers of multitudes, our fabulist-in-chief, routinely finds his "own facts" circulating in what seems to be an otherwise empty mind. Unfortunately, this is no longer mere fodder for a seminar debate.

Accompanying this idea that we are entitled to our own facts is the belief that reality can be invented through sheer force of the will. Authoritarian leaders have always sustained their power by re-defining reality such that complex problems are amenable to simple, authoritarian solutions. The idea of the strongman who can act and succeed independently of true belief, the confidence that conviction and will are sufficient to solve problems, is the logical extension of subjectivism, and the U.S. now has its very own Combover Caligula to test the theory.

This drama takes place against the background of majorities believing that while scientists keep our planes aloft, our computers humming, and help the enormously complex human body fight disease, they can't make simple measurements of CO2 concentration and temperature gradients. Climate change denial is the ultimate fabulation, the most extreme case of simply ignoring an inconvenient reality because you would rather it were different.

The common denominator linking all these fabulations is the belief that reality is whatever the mind says it is. Reality poses no independent standard to which our thoughts and attitudes must conform. Unfortunately, this idea has a rich and influential philosophical pedigree. The monumental presence of Immanuel Kant looms over the modern world, for it was Kant who argued that reality as-it-is-in-itself can never be known. According to Kant, the structure and organization that reality appears to have--constituted by time, space, and causation—is a product of the mind imposing order on reality according to principles and categories that enable these "appearances" to make sense to us.

Before my colleagues in philosophy go apoplectic let me clarify that I am not suggesting a logical or causal connection between the sophisticated arguments of Kant and the puerile subjectivism discussed above. Kant was no subjectivist because he argued that the rules that govern perception and reason are universally shared among rational beings (among which he includes, perhaps mistakenly, persons). Furthermore, his arguments were based on the quite plausible notion that any claim about reality as-it-is-in-itself will be dependent on how the mind gives structure and meaning to that claim, and thus all reference to a mind-independent reality is pure speculation. It was Kant's laudable dislike of unsupported claims and his awareness of the limits of human knowledge that led him to be cautious about claims to know reality. The traditional notion of "the real" is that which is independent of human experience, something unsullied by the distortions imposed by human thought. Kant was right that the very attempt to think such a thing would inevitably bind it to human thought.

Nevertheless, for the rash and incautious, it's a very short step from the view that a mind-independent reality is unknowable to the claim that therefore we can just forget about reality as a constraint on our ideas altogether. Thus, I wonder if the "spirit of the age" has finally run roughshod over the careful, rigorous skepticism of Kant by demonstrating the ultimate absurdity of thought disconnected from reality. At this point in history we urgently need a dose of reality. An awareness of the limits of knowledge and the impenetrability of the real is not sufficient; we need an awareness of reality pushing back, penetrating our insights and offering stubborn facts to which we must attend. After all, Kant does require that we bite a very large bullet. He poses the question whether we should believe him or our lyin' eyes which tell us that reality is right there in front of us. We are all intuitive realists; only in a philosophy seminar would we think otherwise.

Despite its alleged universality, Kant's view that all of this is just an elaborate construction of the mind seems to invite elaborate reconstructions based on all manner of preferences and prejudices, and so I fear that if we are to get beyond fabulation we must get beyond Kant. And that means showing that we need not bite that bullet that Kant thought necessary.

However, the alternative to Kant's transcendental idealism seems equally absurd. For the most straightforward way of rejecting subjectivism is to take on board the kind of objectivity to which the natural sciences aspire—what is real is whatever the best scientific theories say is real. But that leaves us with an arid reality evacuated of all meaning and value, since the mindless, meaningless physical particles and fields of force discovered by physics seem to lack any essential reference to what matters to us. Appeals to science have little to say about what we ought to care about, let alone the aesthetics of wine, moral norms or anything else in life that depends on judgment. We seem to be stranded on one side or the other of an abyss formed by the mighty pillars of objectivity and subjectivity with no way to traverse the chasm. Is there a way across that chasm?

Kant is arguing that we can't prove the common sense view that we are in touch with an independent reality and so intellectual rigor demands we be skeptical. This puts the pursuit of knowledge in the driver's seat but leaves us bereft of the very knowledge we seek. Yet, before we can prove anything we must first meet the causal force of reality head on. As we move about the world it presses in on us, resisting our actions, disrupting intentions, penetrating mind and body, a piercing, gale-force wind that requires careful tacking to navigate.

Kant wants to say this causal force is itself something the mind imposes on itself. But that is only remotely plausible after stepping back in a moment of abstract doubt and asking what we can really know. It's not addressing the human experience of a reality that buffets, ingresses, rubs, wounds, attracts and fascinates. What Kant misses is that our fundamental transaction with the world is not via knowledge. It is via feeling, emotion, sensibility, attraction and repulsion, in other words, aesthetics. Reality is felt before it is known—I suffer and love, therefore I am. Skepticism gets no foothold here.

How does this acknowledgement of the felt influence of causal forces help avoid subjectivism? That would be a very long tale but I will try to provide a sketch. The causal lines of force that resist our aims but also enable all human creativity are indicators of something deep and consequential. For they emerge out of potentialities, latent forces, dispositions in things that when activated by the presence of other things, including human beings, have a direction. I call these directed lines of force telic norms, patterns of probabilities that prescribe how reality might develop under certain conditions. These telic norms are attractors for feeling to which we respond with pleasure or aversion. There is value in the world for without it I doubt that a frog could catch a fly.

Whatever positive influence we have over reality will be realized by responding to telic norms under conditions appropriate to their realization—otherwise chaos ensues. Objectivity is achieved by accurately tracking the lines of force that emerge from a given set of conditions and that provide an anchor for telic norms. Whatever the future holds, it will emerge from these lines of causal influence and our ability to absorb their direction and make use of them. The first contact with them is not the mind that knows but the sensibility that feels drawn or repelled. When the mind spins away from these lines of force we have subjectivity and error.

Which brings me back to wine (you just knew I would return to wine). Winemaking is an art form in which the quality of the final product depends on nature and the recognition that nature has its own powers and dispositions that we can only sometimes, and within limits, influence. With each vintage nature imposes its "will". Good winemakers accurately track the telic norms that emerge first from the grapes and later the wine in its various stages of development in light of their sensibility and intentions regarding the final product.

The problem of objectivity is not that critics or consumers disagree about the quality of particular wines. Of course they disagree. We all have different preferences and histories and convergence of judgment would not be desirable in any case. What matters for objectivity is that critics and others who taste aesthetically track the potential of a wine, taste its ability to provide satisfaction to various people with differing sensibilities. Aesthetic tasting is not a matter of asserting subjective likes or dislikes but of identifying potentiality, the latent forces and indwelling capacities of a wine to produce pleasure.

Of course wine quality (or beauty if you prefer) is subjective to a degree but it is not merely subjective. It isn't something we project or impose onto an object but is a response to something in the object being judged, an appreciation of its power to affect us which is more felt than apprehended.

Kant was alleged to have had a taste for the grape. Had he tasted aesthetically might history have developed differently?

Monday, January 30, 2017

The (Slow) Art of Wine: Part 2

by Dwight Furrow

Over the past several months I've been writing about creativity in the arts, a project motivated by skepticism among philosophers that winemaking could legitimately be considered an art form. (See Part 1, and here, here, and here)

As Burham and Skilleas write on the decisions made in the vineyard and winery:

These decisions are intentions certainly and wine is also a product of human artifice. However, it is not intention in the same sense as a painter might have when he approaches a blank canvas. Vintner's decisions have only a very tenuous connection with expression in the arts which is typically expressions of aesthetic intention, feeling, and the like…Wine is not as malleable to intention as paint and the most important factor beyond the vintner's control is the weather. Try as they might few vintners can remove the sensory impact of the vintage. (The Aesthetics of Wine, p. 99-100)

Burnham and Skilleas seem to think that although winemakers have intentions they are not about aesthetics. This is a questionable assertion. There are countless decisions made by winemakers and their teams in the vineyard and winery that influence the intensity, harmony, finesse, and elegance of the final product and are intended to do so.

Burham and Skilleas go on to insist that "a vintner is simply not to be understood on the model of Kantian or Romantic aesthetics of fine art for whom originality or creativity are absolutely central features." Again, this is a questionable assertion, although it may be true of commodity wines. As James Frey, proprietor of Tristaetum Winery in Oregon's Willamette Valley and an accomplished artist as well as winemaker, told me in an interview: "Originality matters a great deal. No winemaker wants to hear that his wines taste like those of the winery down the street." Originality and creativity are central concerns of at least those winemakers for whom quality is the primary focus.

In addition to their circumscribed conception of winemaking, I think part of the problem with the analysis of Burnham and Skilleas has to do with confusion about what counts as creative intentions. When we get the right account of creative intentionality in the arts we see that winemaking and artistic production really belong in the same category.

As I argued last month, some of the best wines in the world do not involve a lot of high-tech manipulation in the winery but are largely expressions of their vineyard site. Thus part of the challenge will be to show how these wines, which require the cooperation of nature, can embody the creativity of works of art which are, after all, artifacts.

The role of inspiration in creativity has long puzzled philosophers and gave rise to the ancient idea that artists are divinely inspired, afflicted by a muse, or simply crazy. Where do their outlandish ideas come from? It is not at all obvious that the idea of intention does much work in explaining inspiration because artistic ideas often arise, not when we intend them, but when we least expect them. No doubt some works of art begin with a precise idea about what the artist is aiming at. But many do not. They begin with vague ideas which involve a lot of brainstorming or playing around in a medium until something interesting emerges. Inspired ideas often occur to us when we're not even focused on an artistic project.

A study of the creative process by neuroscientist Nancy Andreasan found common phrases used to describe the serendipity of creativity: "I can't force inspiration. Ideas just come to me when I'm not seeking them-when I'm swimming or running or standing in the shower." "It happens like magic." "I can just see things that other people can't, and I don't know why." "The muse just sits on my shoulder." "If I concentrate on finding the answer it never comes, but if I let my mind just wander, the answer pops in."

Thus it doesn't appear that creative activity at this generative stage requires specific intentions about aesthetic properties. It is the unconscious aspect of this that has fascinated writers throughout the centuries.

However, it would be a mistake to think there are no aesthetic-relevant intentions at work in these moments of inspiration. Behind the scenes there are general intentions that guide artists in their projects. There is a general conception of their project operating in the background. They intend to produce something of aesthetic interest, with some originality, and meaning. They may know the genre they wish a particular work to be placed in, have a sense of what can be done in the media in which they work, and be cognizant of their audience or patrons and what they will respond to. They may adhere to theoretical commitments or a sense of how their own body of work is evolving. Most importantly, through their training, history, and observations artists develop a cluster of norms and ways of making perceptual discriminations among works of art. In other words, they develop an aesthetic sensibility that guides their decisions about their own work. It's one thing to generate lots of ideas that are sufficiently unconventional to count as creative. But successful art is a matter of selecting which ideas are worth pursuing. These general intentions, an artist's sensibility and background, act as a filter enabling the experimentation and brainstorming to be productive and focused by tossing out what doesn't work and preserving what does.

These high-level, general intentions may be unconscious and inarticulable and do not require overt judgments about specific aesthetic properties. Nevertheless, they operate in the background regulating creativity activity. Thus, although specific aesthetic properties of a work of art may not be intended, they are a product of the more generalized intentions that arise from artists working within their art world. This, I want to suggest, is the best way to understand creative intentions that avoids attributing excessive deliberation and calculation to the creative process.

The crucial point for my purpose is that winemakers also have these background commitments that guide their winemaking. They also intend to produce something of aesthetic interest that has meaning in light of the winemaking traditions they work in. They also are cognizant of the creative possibilities within their medium and materials, the genres and styles they work in, how their work is evolving. Many, such as winemakers committed to natural wines, have theoretical commitments to which they adhere. Furthermore, since originality and distinctiveness are abiding concerns, part of this background is an implicit understanding of what counts as original within their winemaking culture. This is not to say they all succeed at making original wines. But neither do all artists succeed in their struggle for distinction.

As noted, there are countless decisions made in the vineyard and winery that are designed to realize these aesthetic intentions. But the most important background commitment that shapes the final product is an aesthetic sensibility developed through years of tasting. Winemakers taste repeatedly throughout the process of winemaking from sampling grapes in the vineyard to determining the final blend. In the end, it is what they taste that determines what they do. And because each individual tastes differently, their final product, if not distorted by the goal of homogeneity or consistency, will be different as well. The goal for many artisan winemakers is to preserve terroir, the distinctive features of grapes from a particular vineyard or region. But what that means will differ for each winemaker; each has an interpretation of what it means to preserve terroir through the idiosyncrasies of taste.

However, there is one fundamental difference between winemaking and creativity in the arts. Painting, music composition, literature, etc. usually involve persistent activity with lots of experimentation, erasure, and more experimentation as the work takes shape. Winemaking is different. Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyards, one of the most inventive winemakers in the world, told me that artisan winemaking primarily involves a lot of "watchful waiting", waiting for the weather to give shape to the growing season, waiting for grapes to develop in the vineyard, waiting for fermentations to finish, and especially waiting for the wine to age in barrel and bottle before it's ready to release. Watchful waiting does not seem like an accurate description of painting or musical composition and performance.

Nevertheless, given the above account of creative intentions, "watchful waiting" in the vineyard and winery turns out to be the way in which winemakers realize their creative intentions.

I've been arguing that we should understand creativity in the arts in terms of the possession of general intentions that regulate decisions, even in the absence of deliberation or the carrying out of specific, consciously held intentions to realize specific aesthetic qualities. I want to suggest that the central regulative role that these general intentions play is to provide criteria for a variety of "stopping heuristics", intuitive judgments about when a process is complete and needs no further additions or modifications. At various stages in every work of art there are points at which the artist says OK—that is what I'm looking for. She may not have known what that was ahead of time; she may in fact be really surprised by the result. So we are not talking about a conscious process here. But that eureka moment when you say "aha that's it", the moment when the aesthetic intention is realized, is possible only given a sensibility that defines the parameters of what she's doing. And of course these commitments can change during the process. This is not a set of rules but a sensibility that defines a point of view that is always a moving target.

Yet that is precisely what winemakers are doing with their watchful waiting. They are, after all, watching for something and waiting for something. These are intentional activities the aim of which is to identify when the grapes or wine show the aesthetic potential intended by the winemaker given her aesthetic sensibility.

Thus, a good artist (or winemaker) is not only someone who has the gift of coming up with new combinations of ideas and the skill to manipulate the medium in which she works. It is someone who also has the ability to react sensitively to his or her results selecting those that correspond to a scheme of artistic value embedded in the aforementioned general intentions. And, of course, part of this scheme will be an understanding of what counts as a new development or a departure from the past.

No doubt, in painting or musical composition there is more active, moment-to-moment, shaping of materials when compared to winemaking. The results of brush strokes or new harmonic configurations can be assessed immediately or at least without undue delay. Not so with winemaking. It is a slow art because experiments can take years to unfold. The results of modifications in vineyard practices or winemaking techniques may not be apparent until the wine has aged for several years. Yet, surely the slow pace of experimental results does not subtract from the aesthetic quality of the intention. Neither does the fact that winemakers depend on the cooperation of their materials, as I argued last month. The fact that winemakers give direction to nature in the development of their work is no more an impediment to artistic intent than the fact that painters depend on the cooperation of light or musicians on the structure of their instruments. The medium always shapes the message.

Thus, when sipping your next glass of Pinot Noir—because if you've made it this far in this essay you probably have one in your near future--slow down and savor the moment, for it was made with more patience than even Monet or Mozart could manage.

Monday, January 02, 2017

The Art of Wine: Part 1

by Dwight Furrow

Among the most striking developments in the art world in the past 150 years is the proliferation of objects that count as works of art. The term "art" is no longer appropriately applied only to paintings, sculpture, symphonic music, literature or theatre but includes architecture, photographs, film and television, found objects, assorted musical genres, conceptual works, environments, etc. The Museum of Modern Art in New York proudly displays a Jaguar XKE roadster as a work of art. As Jacques Rancière writes regarding the modernist aesthetic that begins to emerge in the 18th Century:

"The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroying any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself."*

Rancière argues that with the proliferation of objects that now count as art, contemporary art is neither autonomous from nor fully absorbed into everyday life but occupies a borderland between the everyday and the extraordinary that is art's function to continually negotiate. Art is about having a certain kind of aesthetic experience; it is no longer about a particular kind of object.

Wine is among the most prevalent of everyday objects that have no function except to provide an aesthetic experience. And so the question naturally arises: Can wine be a work of art?

No doubt some will immediately object that wine is not designed to provide aesthetic experience but rather to get you drunk. But as an alcohol delivery system wine is terribly inefficient and expensive; the alcohol by itself doesn't explain why connoisseurs love wine. More importantly, the mild buzz one gets from the kind of restrained imbibing associated with wine appreciation is not only compatible with aesthetic appreciation but in fact enhances it. The presence of mild intoxication is hardly incompatible with the appreciation of art as the frequent invocation of Dionysius in the history of art can attest. If we are to understand aesthetic experience as something incompatible with the ecstasies we have clearly lost our way in trying to understand the phenomenon.

Neither is the question of whether wine is an art an idle conceptual matter. The issue is important because it is really about the future of wine (and perhaps art as well). The important thing about art is that it is inexhaustible—there are constantly new developments and new modes of self-expression that enliven art for each new generation. Can something similar be said about wine? Will wine continue to develop as an aesthetic experience with new flavors and textures to explore? If the answer to that is yes then wine will continue to command the interest of people with an interest in taste. So thinking of it as an art not only reflects that aesthetic potential but it will encourage the right sort of engagement with wine, treating it as an aesthetic object rather than merely a commodity. On the other hand, if wine lacks the kind of aesthetic potential that we associate with art, perhaps in the future, it will reach a point where there are few new developments because we've reached a limit to what can be done with wine and thus it becomes a mere commodity like orange juice or milk.

Of course, the answer to this question of whether some wines may be works of art will depend on how you define art which is a vexed question in philosophy and something guaranteed to trap any conversation in endless epicycles of assertions and counter-examples. But it seems reasonable to claim that art, whatever else it might be, is a product of an artist's distinctive vision, imagination, and creativity. At least that is how we understand art today. So I would propose that we think of a work of art as any object that was produced with the primary intent to provide an aesthetic experience and that exhibits a substantial level of creativity in its production.

As noted, wine provides us with aesthetic experiences, and for many winemakers that is their primary intention. But it isn't obvious that winemakers exhibit the kind of creativity associated with the arts. And truth be told, most philosophers do not think winemaking is an art because it is thought that winemakers don't have the same ability to control their product in the way that artist's do. As Skilleas and Burnham in The Aesthetics of Wine insist:

"Vintner's decisions have only a very tenuous connection with expression in the arts which is typically expressions of aesthetic intention, feeling and the like….Wine is not as malleable to intention as paint and the most important factor beyond the vintner's control is the weather. Try as they might few vintners can remove the sensory impact of the vintage." [99]

While Skilleas and Burham are right that a vintner cannot erase the influence of weather, this quoted passage does underplay the degree to which modern technology has influenced winemaking. Vineyard managers can now measure the amount of water uptake for each leaf on the vine and regulate water supply to each individual vine through irrigation; sophisticated planting strategies and canopy management optimizes sun exposure; careful clonal selection produce vines more adaptable to local weather conditions; and optical sorting devices eliminate all but the best grapes from the crush. In the winery, fermentation temperatures can be precisely controlled, aromas given off by the fermenting grapes can be captured and reintroduced, microbursts of oxygen can be introduced at various points in the process to build and control structure, not to mention the availability of hundreds of yeasts, oak products, and chemical additives that contribute to flavor, aroma, and texture. Given modern winemaking techniques and technology, increasingly winemakers have the tools to really shape their wines according to their aesthetic vision suggesting that wine might be a medium of self-expression and creativity for winemakers.

But the problem with using this increased technological control as support for the prominence of creative intention in the winemaking process is that many of the best wines in the world are made the old fashioned way, using few of these newest technologies. The production of these "artisanal" wines seem to have less to do with the winemakers imagination, creativity, and self expression and more to do with using various techniques to bring out the inherent nature of the grapes. At least that is the expressed ideology of the producers who emphasize the importance of terroir, the French term meaning "of the earth". Today there is a great deal of controversy in the wine world about a fundamental contrast between wines that express the geographical features of the vineyard or region vs. wines that are heavily "manipulated" in the winery. I think it is safe to say that most wine writers and dedicated wine lovers prefer wines that express terroir. One of the most intriguing features of wine grapes is their ability to reflect geographical differences. That is a key element in the romance of wine. If wine is in the end more of an expression of the vineyard or region and not the winemaker's imagination and creativity, then winemaking looks less like an art and more like a craft.

Thus, although we could draw a distinction between art wines and artisan wines based on how much control and creative intention is exerted in the winery, since many artisan wines are at least as aesthetically pleasing as art wines, this distinction seems artificial and incapable of capturing the aesthetic dimension of wine quality. It would be strange to argue that wine is an art but the most aesthetically interesting wines don't count.

But is it really the case that artisanal approaches to winemaking lack creativity, imagination, and self-expression? It has become popular among winemakers to be modest about their contribution to the final product and to adopt what might be called a custodial view of winemaking—basically their idea is just don't screw up the grapes and let them express themselves. But I'm not at all persuaded that this custodial view quite captures the decisions that winemakers, viticulturalists and vineyard managers make, even those who are committed to preserving terroir using traditional methods. After all, you can give different winemakers the same grapes and they will produce different wines. And grapes that share terroir often make wines that exhibit substantial differences. Is it true that artists can express their intentions with few constraints while winemakers are stuck doing the best they can with the grapes they have? I think there is some misunderstanding of the nature of art in starkly drawing such a contrast.

No doubt the nature of the grapes one uses will strongly influence the style of wine one produces. But that is also true of artists. The nature of an artist's materials will strongly influence the kind of art she produces. Oils produce a quite different look than do watercolors. A melody played by a violin will sound differently when played by an oboe. Painters must work with a two-dimensional space. The whole history of modern art is a struggle with that limitation. All artists work under the constraints of their materials just as winemakers do.

The fact that winemakers are limited by their grapes therefore does not disqualify artisanal wines from being works of art. In fact, the social scientist Jon Elster in his book Ulysses Unbound defines creativity in the arts as the maximization of aesthetic value under constraint. The reference to constraint is important. Elster thinks the relationship between creativity and the constraints imposed on the creative process is an upside down U-curve. The greater the constraint, the more potential for creativity exists unless the constraints are so severe that creativity becomes impossible. Thus, the constraints that weather and other contingencies impose on winemakers encourage creativity; they don't preclude it. But the question of control and intention raised by Burnham and Skilleas in the above quote is an important one. If the aesthetic features of a wine are not something intended or created by the winemaker and her team then it is implausible to think of wine as an art.

In my essay on Creative Receptivity last month I began to sort out what it means to have a creative intention in the arts. No doubt part of the creative process is akin to brainstorming—juxtaposing ideas in new combinations. Painters juxtapose shapes, colors, and lines. Musicians juxtapose notes, rhythmic sequences, and sound textures when conceptualizing how to proceed with a new work. The analog in winemaking is the tasting winemakers do in the vineyard and in the winery trying to conceptualize what the finished wine will be like giving what they taste in the grapes. Experienced winemakers, including artisan winemakers using traditional methods, have a sense of their style preferences and know the tendencies and dispositions of their vineyards. Yet, every year because of the influence of weather and changes in vineyard practices they must revisit those intentions re-conceptualizing their intention when their tasting reveals something new or unexpected as it routinely does. Creative intentions are present in winemaking but can be solidified only after tasting.

But this need to develop creative intentions only after assessing the condition of one's materials is not unique to winemaking. An equally important part of the creative process in the arts is the adoption of an aesthetic attitude toward the work as it is developing. Genuine artistic ability involves selecting which of the brainstormed ideas is worth pursuing and, crucially, which of them can be realized in the materials one has available. Creativity in the arts is about execution in a physical medium and that means being receptive to how the world is, reacting to one's materials as they are developing and shaping one's intentions in light of that development. No artist or musician can successfully make her materials do what they are not disposed to do. All materials have dispositional properties that the artist must be intimately acquainted with. It's that obduracy of matter, the stubbornness of physical objects, which gives art its friction, and makes art more than the idle spinning of ideas.

Thus, artists and winemakers are in the same boat in that their intentions are limited and shaped by their materials. If there is a difference between winemakers and artists it will be a matter of degree. Yet I doubt the differences are substantial. Our common understanding of how intentions work in the creative process are incomplete and, once that picture is filled in, the differences between creativity in winemaking vs. the arts shrink. But more on that next month in Part 2.

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Bloomsbury, 2013,p. 19.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Imagine: Listening to Songs Which Make Us More Generous

by Jalees Rehman

It does not come as a surprise that background music in a café helps create the ambience and affects how much customers enjoy sipping their cappuccinos. But recent research suggests that the choice of lyrics can even impact the social behavior of customers. The researcher Nicolas Ruth and his colleagues from the University of Würzburg (Bavaria, Germany) assembled a playlist of 18 songs with pro-social lyrics which they had curated by surveying 74 participants in an online questionnaire as to which songs conveyed a pro-social message. Examples of pro-social songs most frequently nominated by the participants included "Imagine" by John Lennon or "Heal the World" by Michael Jackson. The researchers then created a parallel playlist of 18 neutral songs by the same artists in order to truly discern the impact of the pro-social lyrics.

Here is an excerpt of both playlists

Artist Pro-social playlist Neutral playlist

P!nk Dear Mr. President Raise Your Glass

John Lennon Imagine Stand By Me

Michael Jackson Heal the World Dirty Diana

Nicole Ein bisschen Frieden Alles nur für dich

Pink Floyd Another Brick in the Wall Wish You Were Here

Scorpions Wind of Change Still Loving You

Wiz Khalifa See You Again Black and Yellow

The researchers then arranged for either the neutral or the pro-social playlist to be played in the background in a Würzburg café during their peak business hours and to observe the behavior of customers. The primary goal of the experiment was to quantify the customers' willingness to pay a surcharge of 0.30 Euros for fair trade coffee instead of regular coffee. Fair trade coffee is more expensive because it is obtained through organizations which offer better trading conditions to coffee bean farmers, prohibit child labor and support sustainable farming practices. Information about fair trade coffee was presented on a blackboard in the center of the café so that all customers would walk past it and the server was trained by the researchers to offer the fair trade surcharge in a standardized manner. The server also waited for a minimum of six minutes before taking the orders of guests so that they would be able to hear at least two songs in the background. During the observation period, 123 customers heard the prosocial playlist whereas 133 heard the neutral playlist.

The effect of this brief exposure to prosocial songs was quite remarkable. The percentage of customers who opted for the more expensive fair trade coffee option doubled when they head prosocial songs! Only 18% of customers hearing the neutral playlist were willing to pay the extra 0.30 Euros – even though they had also seen the information board about the benefits of fair trade coffee – but 38% of the customers hearing prosocial songs opted for the fair trade option.

Interestingly, hearing prosocial songs did not affect the tipping behavior of the customers. Independent of what music was playing in the background, customers tipped the server roughly 12% of the bill. This is in contrast to a prior study conducted in a French restaurant in which hearing prosocial songs increased the tipping behavior. One factor explaining the difference could be the manner by which the songs were selected. The French study specifically created a playlist of prosocial songs with French lyrics whereas the Würzburg playlist contained mostly English-language songs, often with global themes such as world peace, brotherhood and abolishing boundaries. Supporting fair trade may be more consistent with the images evoked by these global-themed songs than increased tipping of a server in Germany. It is also important to note that servers or waiters in Germany are comparatively well-compensated by restaurants and cafés, therefore they do not really depend on their income from tips.

The Würzburg experiment raises some intriguing questions about how music – either consciously or subconsciously – affects our immediate decision-making. The researchers went to great lengths to minimize confounding factors by matching up songs from the same artists in both playlists. Their work is also one of the first examples of a field study in a real-world setting because prior studies linking music and pro-social behavior have been mostly conducted in laboratory settings where pro-social behavior is experimentally simulated. But one also needs to consider some caveats before generalizing the results of the study.

Würzburg is a university town where students represent a significant proportion of the population. The researchers estimated that more than 40% of the customers were in their 20s, consistent with a principal student clientele which may be more mindful of the importance of fair trade. The history of Würzburg is also noteworthy because more than 80% of the city was destroyed in a matter of minutes during the Second World War when the British Royal Air force firebombed this predominantly civilian city and killed an estimated 5,000 residents. Residents of the city may be therefore especially sensitive to songs and imagery that evoke the importance of peace and the perils of war.

Some of the next steps in exploring this fascinating link between background music and behavior is to replicate the findings in other cities and also with participants from varying age groups and cultural backgrounds. Another avenue of research could be to assess whether the content of the lyrics affects distinct forms of behavior. Are there some prosocial songs which would increase local prosocial behavior such as tipping or supporting local charities whereas others may increase global social awareness? How long do the effects of the music last? Are customers consciously aware of the lyrics they are hearing in the background or are they just reacting subconsciously? The number of questions raised by this study shows us how exciting the topic is and that we will likely see more field studies in the years to come that will enlighten us.

Wine and Nature's Rift

by Dwight Furrow

Most of the wine purchased in the U.S is an industrial product made by mega-companies that seek to eliminate the uncertainties of nature in pursuit of a reliable, inexpensive, standardized commodity. But most of the wineries in the U.S. are small-to-mid-sized, artisan producers who lack both the technology and the inclination to make a standardized product immune to nature's whims. For these producers and their customers, the call of the wild is at least a murmur.

Although wine is one of the most alluring products of culture, its attraction is in part due to its capacity to reveal nature. When made with proper care, wine in its structure and flavor reflects its origins in grapes grown in a particular geographical location with unique soils, weather, native yeasts, bacteria, etc. Although the grape juice becomes wine via a controlled fermentation process and is the outcome of an idea brought to fruition by means of technology, the basic material came into existence through natures' bounty-- roots, trunk and leaves interacting with soil, sun, and rain. Despite the technological transformations that occur downstream, the character of the wine is thoroughly dependent on what takes place inside the clusters of grapes hanging on the vine in a particular, unique location. As any winemaker will tell you, you cannot make good wine from bad grapes and the character of a wine will depend substantially on those natural processes in the vineyard. When you savor a delicious wine you savor the effects of morning fog, midday heat, wind that banishes disease, soil that regulates water and nutrient uptake, bacteria that influence vine health, native yeasts that influence fermentation, the effects of frost in the spring, of rain during harvest—an endless litany of natural processes over which winemakers and viticulturists often have only limited control.

In this respect wine differs from most other beverages some of which are made in a factory by putting ingredients together according to a recipe; others which are directly a product of agriculture but don't display so readily the unique character of their origins. Orange juice from California tastes like orange juice from Florida. Beer can be made anywhere without significant geographical effects on flavor or texture. Not so with grapes. For most wine lovers, it is that taste of geographical difference that fascinates, a difference that is, in part, nature's murmuring.

But of course the nature revealed through wine is not "unspoiled nature". All agriculture is a form of cultivation and thus equally part of culture. The influence of nature on wine is made possible by countless human decisions in the vineyard and in the winery. Those aforementioned natural processes can be encouraged or discouraged. The effects of midday heat can be shaped by positioning vine shoots on wires and controlling the leaf canopy, vine health can be controlled through chemical sprays, the effects of native yeast counteracted by commercial yeast, the threat of spring frost mitigated by wind machines and thoughtful planting. And of course, the processes of vinification and aging also contribute substantially to the final product. Wine does not make itself and, although grapes can grow wild, only careful cultivation in the vineyard and the winery will make a wine drinkable, let alone worthy of being savored.

It is not "unspoiled" nature (whatever that means) that wine lovers admire but nature highly edited. Yet it is nature nevertheless because the central fact about winemaking is that nature is obdurate, recalcitrant, always pushing back against even the most ingenious cultivation. Despite our significant advances in technology, winemaking is a matter of riding the maelstrom. Or, to employ a different metaphor, nature throws curves that only the best winemakers can hit out of the park and every curveball is a little different from the last. Even minor variations in weather, especially the timing of weather events, can have profound impact on the condition of the grapes and ultimately the taste of the wine. Whatever the intentions of the winemaker, they will be influenced by nature, and woe to the winemaker who ignores those limitations--which is why there can be no recipe for making wine. Every vintage is like a new baby and past practices can be only a rough guide.

Many wine writers argue that this fundamental dependence on nature and the constraints it imposes on a winemaker's intentions means that wine cannot be an art. The Wine Spectator's Matt Kramer wrote:

"So why isn't fine wine "art"? The answer is surprisingly simple. Art is creation; wine is amplification. The big difference between an artist and a winemaker is that an artist starts with a blank sheet while a winemaker works with the exact opposite. A grape arrives at the winery with all the parts included, a piñata stuffed with goodies, just waiting to be cracked open. Is there a craft to doing that? You bet there is. But where an artist conceives of something out of the proverbial thin air, no winemaker anywhere in the world can do any such thing." (Kramer, WS, October 2008)

I think this view of art and winemaking is mistaken. The inflection point where creativity fully enters the winemaking process begins when the grapes are sampled in the vineyard and the winemaker begins to develop a vision of what those grapes can become. If something new, something different and unfamiliar is tasted sparking a "vision" of new ways of expressing nature in the finished wine, then winemaking begins to look more like art than a craft. Imagination as well as tasting acuity are pre-requisites for great winemaking.

Two quotes from the history of art highlight this idea that discovery is essential to the process of creation. Michelangelo is reputed to have said:

"In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it."

By studying the network of lines and fissures in a piece of marble he was able to "set free" the subject of the work.

And with a similar theme, the Renaissance painter Albrecht Durer wrote:

"For in truth, art lies hidden in nature; he who can wrest it from her, has it."

20th Century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, citing the Durer quote as inspiration, argued that great art begins with an initial sketch, what he called a "rift design", in which the artist discovers the rift in her materials—a creative response to what the materials offer up as possibilities. Mutatis mutandi, that strikes me as a good description of what winemakers do when seeking an original expression from their vineyards.

Heidegger emphasized the "thingly character", the tension introduced by materials and their resistance to human intention, as crucial to great art. All materials are "things" that have limits and can take on some form but not others. For painters, oil differs from water colors; for music composers one can elicit a particular sound from an oboe but not a piano. Understanding the resistances and possibilities inherent in materials is the work of creativity in both art and winemaking. The winemaker's art is in finding the point in nature where something genuinely new can find its world, can find its place within culture, where nature, the unfamiliar, expresses a salient possibility that can be realized in our phenomenal experience.

In responding to the contingencies and uncertainties of nature, it is essential for winemakers to know the relevant science because what happens in nature depends on chemistry. The making of a great wine usually requires knowing the numbers—sugar levels, types and strength of acids, fermentation temperature, and other more exotic measurements--if only to avoid making a mistake by taking the wine in a direction it will refuse to go. Science helps understand the constraints of the winemaker's materials and presents possible avenues to respond to them. Yet two wines with roughly the same vital statistics may taste quite differently. Science will not reveal the beautiful; only intuitive judgment and imagination can.

This display of the rift in nature that enables its entry into culture is a large part of wine's attraction. This is why wine lovers' current fascination with terroir, the French word meaning "of the earth", is so necessary for wine to maintain its allure. We want the connection with nature that is revealed despite the cultivation. It reminds us of a world long lost in which nature was a mysterious, blind impress, yet is refined enough for us to witness the human cultivation of beauty, albeit by a tenuous hand, never quite in control. It symbolizes a kind of care, a form of attention to nature that is too quickly fading from our lives. Wine is a powerful symbol of nature because nature with its impenetrability and resistance to human intention is a significant factor in its cultivation.

No other product quite combines the obduracy of nature with such exquisite culturally embedded refinement. More than simply "tasting good" wine is a symbol of the ambivalent and complicated rift within nature that is culture's horizon.

Monday, September 12, 2016

Food, Art and Emotion: The Art Menu at Topolobampo

The question of whether food preparation can be a fine art turns on two issues:

Does food have the rich assortment of meanings typical of fine art? and

Does food express emotion in the same sense that music or painting does?

As I argued in American Foodie, both these questions depend on whether food can function as a complex symbol or metaphor. Food exemplifies or shows what it's trying to say via its flavors and textures, just as a painting displays its meaning in colors, lines, and brush strokes or a piece of music in its melodic/harmonic structure and timbres. As a conceptual matter these questions can be answered in the affirmative. However, the problem is that chefs must satisfy hunger, cater to taste preferences, and make a profit, and these practical constraints often limit their artistic aspirations.

Thus, when restaurants make an effort to highlight the artistic aspirations of their chefs, it is a special occasion, so I could not resist a trip to Chicago to sample the Art Menu of Rick Bayless and his chefs at his restaurant Topolobampo. Bayless is the acclaimed auteur of refined Mexican cuisine. Each summer his chefs create a tasting menu in which each dish expresses an emotion. The chefs then select works of art from the restaurant's collection of Mexican art that expresses the same emotion as each dish—all explained and depicted in a helpful brochure that is given to guests who order the menu. This is a fascinating experiment in cross-modal metaphor that if successful adds another data point favoring the artistic credentials of food.

The first course on the menu, a bright, fresh interpretation of Snapper Veracruz using salmon sashimi as the fish was labeled as exuberant, an appropriate description of this dish that features the kinetic energy of olives, capers, jalapenos, and sea urchin all orchestrated to flatter the buttery slices of salmon. As an opener setting an exuberant mood, the dish was superb. But "exuberance" was less successful as an interpretation of the painting, Tierras by Rolando Rojas . While I get the exuberance of the figures that are depicted as if swimming in rippling tides of color, their wraith-like, ghostly presence haunts the painting suggesting death or decay. This points to a potential problem with these cross modal references. While dishes often express a simple emotion, paintings are sometimes more complex embodying conflicting often negative emotions that a dish might have trouble expressing.

The exuberant sashimi is followed by oysters poached in chile/truffle broth rimmed with sliced truffle and drizzled with creamy foie gras and caviar (pictured above). This dish exudes desire. Oysters, of course have long been a symbol of the erotic, and the voluptuous texture of this dish and the deep, carnal flavors are sensual in the extreme.

The painting Bicicletas Y Constelaciones by Enrique Flores was perfectly paired. The dark night sky is etched with finely drawn outlines of lovers in sexual embrace as if forming constellations overlooking a brightly-lit colorful scene dominated by gendered bikes absent their riders, parked on a dense bed of luscious flowers in the foreground. Where are the riders? The sky tells all. A very successful dish and reading.

Desire is then supplanted with uncertainty (as it so often is). Carne Apache, two tartares, of yellowtail and ribeye, were capped with a guajillo pepper gelatin sheet, radish, and drizzled with a Szechwan pepper/ponzu sauce. (Pictured below) Because the flavor of tartar is subtle and the flavors of citrus, Szechuan pepper and guajillo are bold it was sometimes difficult to tell if I was eating fish or meat. And of course the dish hovers between Asia and Mexico in its influences so uncertainty seems the appropriate label. There is an issue about emotion in art that this dish raises. Uncertainty is sometimes a state of mind with no emotional content. But sometimes uncertainty is a feeling state if the thing you're uncertain about matters. The issue here isn't whether the dish made me feel uncertain. It didn't. The issue is whether it expresses uncertainty. Just as a sad song need not make you feel sad, yet can still express sadness, a dish can express uncertainty by exemplifying it.

Regarding the painting, an untitled work by Rodolfo Morales, "uncertainty" as an emotion label is at best incomplete. The inset painting on the bottom left of the work depicts a starkly furnished, darkened, room with no inhabitants. In the upper right is an inset painting of a doorway with the feet of a prone body lying across the threshold. Is the body dead or alive? Nothing in the painting provides a clue. There is the uncertainty; the uncertainty of interpretation. But the faces that dominate the painting are stoic with a hint of sadness in the line of the eyes of the middle face. I sense loss and the necessity of endurance in this painting, none of which is captured by the label and I have no idea how to capture it in a dish.

After the strains of desire and uncertainty we are ready for a little serenity, represented by Pastured Chicken resting in a squash-blossom porridge. These flavors brought immediate memories of chicken pot pie or perhaps a thickened chicken soup--very comforting indeed. The gentleness of the soft, yielding chicken and creamy porridge was interrupted only by the spiciness of the roasted serranos that was subtle enough to remain in the background. This was not the most interesting dish on the menu but it was comforting and calming as was the painting by Filemon Santiago with which it was paired. This untitled work of earth tones bathed in soft yellow-tinged light is an evocation of the simple, wholesome foods enjoyed by peasants in a farming community. Another successful joining of visual, gustatory, and emotive metaphor.

The final savory dish, advertised as an expression of nostalgia, was braised short rib with mushroom bread pudding, resting on a puree of greens and sweet potato supported by chile-infused beef broth. I suppose whether this evokes nostalgia or not depends on your own food memories. The painting, entitled "Iguana Is Eaten in this House" by Roman Andrade LLaguno, and the chefs explanation of his thought process, suggest the dish should remind us of family and friends. It surely is comfort food in that it is rich, warm, soft, and filling, with earthy, familiar flavors. Yet there is something more complex going on in the painting. In the painting, all of the characters save one are women. The most prominent aspect are their intensely concentrating, parallel eyes as well as hints of female companionship if not lesbianism. The only man in the painting has offset eyes showing clear cubist influences suggesting something is not quite right with him. The iguana, although an important traditional source of food, has more symbolic import in this painting. Iguanas in fact have a third "eye" on the top of their head thus resonating with the "eye theme" that dominates the rest of the painting. And, since the latter decades of the 20th Century, iguanas have become a symbol of feminine power thanks to a photo of a Oaxacan woman carrying iguanas to the market on her head that became iconic. Although there is clearly something nostalgic about the painting it has layers of meaning that suggest some tension with an easily recoverable past. The painting troubles nostalgia, even as it expresses it.

Resonating colors are the theme of the first dessert, with the white coffee ice cream, white chocolate/coconut ganache, white yogurt foam with pour-over chocolate sauce and a splash of raspberry complementing the colors of the painting, which is entitled El Grito (The Cry). Betrayal is supposed to be the emotion here. If you are a dark chocolate purist, you may feel betrayed by the mere appearance of white chocolate, which the chef describes as the point of dish. There is good thematic continuity here; but thankfully this luscious dessert did not make me cry.

And at last a joyful dessert, called Pinata Dulce, named for its crispy meringue that must be penetrated to get at the medley of sorbets and lemon cookie with lemon verbena crema. It had surprising, explosive flavors and complex textures, although it lacked the alien, fantastical, terrifying aspect of the creature in Miguel Linares's painting Alebrijes. It was anything but joyful since it signaled the end of the meal.

Carnes Apache (two tartares)

What are we to conclude from this flavorful tour through Mexican cultural heritage? In the interpretation of art and food, it is important to distinguish how the work makes you feel from what the work expresses. A work of art can express anger without making you feel angry. A dish can express joy without making you feel joyful. Of course food (and art) makes you feel emotion as well but expression is a different matter. No doubt food can express emotion, but it isn't obvious that it has the capacity to express complex, conflicting, often negative emotions in the way some works of art do. Food must taste good and be harmonious. That makes expressing negative emotions difficult, although perhaps not impossible. There was after all conflict expressed in the Carnes Apache, the dish with the two tartars described above. What would a meal expressing anger, fear, and resentment be like?

Thus, I think we are better off thinking of food as representational, as representing (i.e. exemplifying symbolically) food traditions and cultural sensibilities. Emotional expression is part of food appreciation but is perhaps not as central as it is for music because music has a wider and deeper emotional range from which to draw. In fact I think wine does a better job of expressing conflict and negative emotions than food does although I'm open to being dissuaded of that.

At any rate, this was a thought provoking meal, and the presentation was superb. Some dishes were more successful than others but emotions are like that as well—some hit their mark, some miss by a mile. There were no wide misses here.

Mr. Bayless and his staff are to be commended for this stimulating meal and if you are in Chicago I highly recommend a trip to Topolobampo.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Wine and Epiphany

by Dwight Furrow

Almost everyone connected to the world of wine has a story about their "aha" experience, the precise moment when they discovered there was something extraordinary about wine. For some that moment is a sudden, unexpected wave of emotion that overcomes them as they drink a wine that seems utterly superior to anything they had consumed in the past. For others it's the culmination of many lesser experiences that overtime gather and build to a crescendo when they recognize that these disparate paths all lead to a consummate experience that should be a constant presence in their lives going forward.

For me it was the former. As a casual and occasional consumer of ordinary wine for many years, I had my first taste of quality Pinot Noir in a fine Asian "tapas" restaurant. I was blown away by the finesse with which the spice notes in the food seemed to resonate with similar flavors in the wine. The wine, I now know, was an ordinary mid-priced Pinot Noir from Carneros; Artesa was the producer. But to me in that moment, it was extraordinarily beautiful and I resolved to make that experience a regular part of life.

A simple Google search will turn up any number of these stories. The Wall Street Journal's Lettie Teague interviewed several wine lovers about their "aha" moment. One became intrigued by wine while an art student in Italy, another when he discovered he had a discerning palate, many report childhood experiences of being impressed by the serious conversations about wine among the adults in their lives, others were intrigued by wine's complexity or the sense of adventure and risk involved in the winemaking process. Teague herself reports the wine talk of her study-abroad family in Ireland as the catalyst that launched her career as a wine writer.

These stories have two things in common. In each case the experiences are motivating. Like all experiences of beauty we don't passively have them and move on. The recognition of genuine beauty inspires us to want more.

A work we admire, a work we love, a work we find, in a word, beautiful sparks within us the same need to rush to converse with it, the same sense that it has more to offer, the same willingness to submit to it, the same desire to make it part of our life. (Only a Promise of Happiness, 205)

The second feature of these stories is that the "aha" moment happens only after the stage has been set. A novice with little prior experience with wine or engagement with wine culture will not have the discernment to have an "aha" moment. It is fundamentally an experience of difference which can have an impact only if a storehouse of ordinary has already been established. Only after we build an intuitive sense of what wine should taste like and what quality means can the conditions for an "aha" moment be present. Some of the above reports are of people who experienced their epiphany when very young, but in these cases they had been exposed to wine and wine talk over a significant period of time and were already thoroughly absorbed in wine culture.

These two features, the motivational dimension and the need for stage-setting suggests that the "aha" experience is more than just an experience of pleasure. It is falling in love.

To the uninitiated this probably sounds peculiar. Wine talk is often criticized for being pretentious and without substance and wine lovers can be the subject of derision when their obsession is on display. Shouldn't the word "love" be confined to our feelings for persons, pets, or spiritual beings? For those who have not yet swooned perhaps wine seems too insignificant to be a proper object of loving attention.

To see why this dismissive attitude is mistaken we need to explore the nature of love.

As I argued more extensively in an earlier essay, love is a response to the perception of value. We love something when we discover consummate value in it. But we don't love something because we have reasons to do so. Love isn't primarily an intellectual apprehension like assenting to the conclusion of an argument. It's a matter of emotion, a feeling of strong attraction, but based on perception and sensibility. When we love something we sense that it is pregnant with possibility. This is especially true of wine since our experience of it is rooted in sensation.

Even ordinary, everyday perceptions are infused with implicit value judgments that are related to possibilities and our expectations about them. I don't simply see the bus hurtling down the street, but judge its trajectory as benign or threatening, as normal or abnormal, and these value judgments are as much a part of our perceptions as sensing a color, shape, or flavor. This is especially true of what we ingest. When we taste something we immediately make a value judgment-- we like it or we don't, it's familiar or unfamiliar, apparently safe or potentially dangerous.

But these judgments we make as part of our perceptual sensibilities are not judgments of something static. The things we perceive are disposed to change. A glass bowl is disposed to break even when sitting comfortably on a shelf, a disposition that becomes more evident when the shelf tilts. This expectation of change, the intuition that objects exist on a trajectory of ordered transformation related to an object's possibilities, is built into our perceptual judgments and we therefore, without deliberation, reach out to prevent the bowl from falling. Part of our perceptual sensibility is recognizing the potential of a situation, and often this is nothing more than a pervasive feeling of rightness or wrongness that motivates us to take action.

And so it is with love. The initial affinities that ultimately become full blown love emerge from this pervasive quality that things have as we encounter them in experience. The example above of a generic bowl sitting on a generic shelf was of a simple object with a limited set of dispositions that issue in routine expectations. It isn't pregnant with unfolding possibilities—it most likely will just continue to sit there, mutely and obscurely doing its thing. It is unlikely to be loved without some very special circumstances that allow it to acquire more potential. But many persons, objects, or practices that we encounter have deep and diverse potential based on the recognition of developing but incomplete patterns in their nature some of which our actions can help complete. We see in them, the potential for further involvement, not as a plan or policy but as a felt richness when they seem tailor-made for our engagement.

Wine offers this kind of engagement. In wine once we have some knowledge and experience with it, we sense many dimensions influenced by a vast array of unpredictable factors. It is only fermented grape juice but it displays a seemingly infinite array of different ways of being delicious, all of them reflecting significant geographical variations across much of the globe, deeply embedded cultural traditions, as well as the imaginations of dedicated winemakers all in symbiotic relation to the foods we eat, and all in constant change. This potential is what immersion in wine culture enables us to sense.

This is the real meaning of "quality"—a set of dispositional properties that promise more than superficial engagement because they have great variety, intensity or provide a deep contrast with static, familiar, completed patterns. This felt potential for further engagement is a natural lure, an attractant that demands our active engagement.

What we sense in that aha moment then is a world opening up that seems to have no boundaries yet draws all of life together. In this respect, wine is no different from other things we love. Everything we encounter in experience is an opportunity for a continuing transaction, whether through attraction or repulsion. The things we love—our children, romantic partners, friends, activities or objects such as wine, music, sports, books, etc.—have an initial grip on us because we sense that they are redolent with possibilities. Sensation has a holistic, agential quality; the restless energy of curiosity commandeers our sensory mechanisms employing them as probes seeking intensity, qualitative contrast, and potential patterns to be completed by further actions. The value judgments we make about objects, activities, or persons begin as this affective "standing out" against a background of normalcy.

The precondition of love is this recognition of quality. We sense that some objects, persons, or practices are pregnant with potential because they afford us opportunities for engagement. Of course whether we fall in love or not depends on how that engagement proceeds, but the initial impetus toward love is aesthetic. The "aha" moment is possible only when we have enough acquaintance with wine to sense all of this.

The love of wine, then, is not just a passive, pleasurable response to a stimulus. It is shot through with expectations and judgments. And like anything else we love it involves mystery. The "aha" moment is a moment in which you taste something you have never tasted before. It's an experience of depth and a recognition that there is more here than one might expect, that the wine and the wine world have more to give, that my engagement hasn't reached its full potential. Beauty draws us in because the patterns we sense are incomplete.

Is wine uniquely capable of producing this experience, at least among beverages? Far be it from me to argue with beer or scotch fans but only wine seems to have the strong connection to place, traversing the boundary between nature and culture that becomes more fascinating the more "nature" disappears. That something so cultured and refined is subject to the vagaries of geography, and utterly dependent on farming, is one of the enduring mysteries of wine, a transformation to which bearing witness deserves to be called epiphany.

Monday, July 18, 2016

The Aesthetic Value of Simplicity

by Dwight Furrow

Black Square, Malevich 1923

However, traditional Western aesthetics apparently demurs on this point since it enshrines complexity as a fundamental aesthetic value. Works of art are considered great if they repay our continued attention. Each new contact with them reveals something new, and this information density and the way it is organized to reveal new dimensions is what brings aesthetic pleasure. Achieving unity in variety is the sine qua non of aesthetic value according to most accounts of our aesthetic tradition. Unity, balance, and clarity are valuable only if they are achieved by organizing complex phenomena. Novelty and the availability of multiple interpretations in part define the kind of interest we take in aesthetic objects. Monroe Beardsley in his influential work Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (1958, 1981) went so far as to argue that complexity along with unity and intensity provide logically necessary (and perhaps sufficient) conditions of aesthetic value.

It's worth noting that in my own small corner of the world of aesthetics, wine-tasting, complexity is admired and simplicity a sign of inferior quality. Legendary and high scoring wines all exhibit complex flavor profiles and extensive evolution on the palate. Simple wines might be enjoyable for dinner but seldom induce rapture.

Since complexity and simplicity at least superficially appear to be contradictory criteria it would seem that simplicity has no role to play in Beardsley's attempt to codify aesthetics. Of course, as I noted above, there are art works that apparently don't exhibit complexity, and today Beardsley is regarded as over-reaching if he intended his criteria to be logically necessary or sufficient. Such definitions have fallen out of favor in most philosophical circles to be replaced by generalizations that hold only for the most part. Yet, complexity, unity, and intensity are useful reference points for evaluating works of art despite the exceptions.

Perhaps Beardsley is guilty of cultural prejudice in ignoring the role of simplicity that characterize other aesthetic traditions, but the prominence of complexity as a fundamental aesthetic value does raise questions about what role simplicity should play in our aesthetic judgments. No doubt we sometimes enjoy simplicity but the question is whether it is a fundamental value or not and how we are to understand that value.

To be fair to defenders of complexity, they need not deny that simplicity can sometimes enhance aesthetic value. Beardsley's criteria (complexity, unity, and intensity) interact and influence each other and none can be maximized. Too much complexity is just confusing and undermines the unity of a work. Complexity without organization is meaningless and bringing unity to a work often requires that an artist heavily edit, i.e. simplify, initial drafts or sketches. Art and music composition students are constantly enjoined to simplify because simplification can make the focal point of a work stand out. But this demand to simplify treats simplicity as having instrumental value only. Its purpose is to make a work more coherent. The aim is not simplicity itself but rather to utilize simplification as a way of achieving other artistic aims such as unity or intensity.

Similarly, pauses in music or negative space in painting are deployed because they create tension and contrast; both make use of simplification to achieve an effect. But that appears to be a strategy that aims at intensity rather than adopting simplicity as an independent value. Similarly, we often welcome simplicity as a contrast to sensory overload. After viewing several disturbing and difficult paintings in a museum we might welcome a simple landscape; after listening to Wagner or Mars Volta, we might really appreciate Erik Satie or some homespun blues. But again this seems to be an instrumental use of simplicity to achieve balance in one's experience or to relax and prepare the mind to appreciate more complex works. At most simplicity seems to be a secondary value, a useful tool for achieving more fundamental aims.

However, Japanese aesthetics provides insight into how we should understand the appeal of simplicity. Simplicity seems central to the goal of Shizen, which means to be without pretense or artifice--"from itself, thus it does" according to one translation, "what is spontaneously or naturally so". Kenko, the 14th Century Buddhist monk often cited for his authoritative commentary on aesthetics writes:

A house, though it may not be in the current fashion or elaborately decorated, will appeal to us by its unassuming beauty -- a grove of trees with an indefinably ancient look; a garden where plants, growing of their own accord, have a special charm; a verandah and an open-work wooden fence of interesting construction; and a few personal effects left lying about, giving the place an air of having been lived in. A house which multitudes of workmen have polished with every care, where strange and rare Chinese and Japanese furnishings are displayed, and even the bushes and trees of the garden have been trained unnaturally, is ugly to look at and most depressing. How could anyone live for long in such a place? (From Kenko, Essays in Idleness: he Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, trans. Donald Keene)

Ornamentation and decoration are avoided because the intent is to make the object look as if it arose naturally even when it is obviously an artifact.

In the case of Shizen, is simplicity a tool to achieve naturalness or is it an inherent component of naturalness? Of course a work can be simple and artificial; simplicity does not logically entail naturalness. Perhaps we should understand simplicity in Japanese aesthetics as a symbolic device to signal naturalness in much the way simplicity in Quaker aesthetics symbolizes devotion to God. This would be to view simplicity as having merely instrumental value, a tool to signal an ideology, but I think that would be a misunderstanding. Simplicity does not merely indicate naturalness, it exemplifies it, shows what it is saying, or at least it can in the hands of someone with talent.

To make sense of this in the context of Western aesthetics it is helpful to invoke a concept that seems to have slipped from view in modern aesthetics although it was central in the Renaissance—the concept of sprezzatura. The 16th Century Italian diplomat and author Baldassare Castiglione first used this term in The Book of the Courtier. He defines it as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it". The courtier, Castiglione argued, has the ability to display "an easy facility in accomplishing difficult actions which hides the conscious effort that went into them".

What Castiglione is pointing to here is the aesthetic pleasure we get from ease, when effects flow naturally from a source without apparent force or manipulation, a display of what something is without addition. This is likely the source of the aesthetic pleasure mathematicians and scientists report when they witness an elegant proof or theory. It is why we are thrilled by vocalists who hit the high notes without straining or athletes who seem to glide when they run. These examples are of course kinds of human actions but I think aesthetic objects can display ease and naturalness as well displaying their essential character without adornment or obvious effort on the part of the artist who puts it on display.

In these cases, simplicity is not an instrument to achieve ease; simplicity constitutes ease by displaying it. It seems forced to understand the aesthetic aim in these cases as something other than simplicity such as unity or balance. Ease itself is aesthetically satisfying.

As you might have guessed if you have read my other writings, I'm nattering on about this because it has something to do with wine and food.

Simple wines and foods are good because they often have lots of flavor. But they also have appeal because there is an unaffectedness to them. Simple chopped tomatoes macerated in lemon juice and olive oil served over pasta; roast chicken with some aromatics in the cavity and basted with olive oil or butter; a fresh rosé from Provence or Lambrusca from Emilia Romagna—these can be aesthetically pleasing not only as a contrast with excessive complexity or as a means of generating intensity but because there is a naturalness to them, a display of what something is that settles effortlessly into the flow of life around it.

Isn't that why a simple, well sung folk or blues song can be beautiful? Such phenomena may lack the thrill we get from structure and organization finding unity in complexity. The unity is there but it doesn't arise from an active pulling together of diverse elements. The unity exists without addition or amendments and that naturalness is part of the appeal.

Thus it seems simplicity can sometimes have independent aesthetic value. Some simple things are just boring. And sometimes as noted above simplicity is an instrument to achieve intensity. But ease and lack of affectation does seem to be something we enjoy even when we grant the aesthetic value of complexity.

Monday, May 23, 2016

Wine Quality: Distinguishing the Fine from the Ordinary

by Dwight Furrow

We who are absorbed in the philosophy of wine are usually preoccupied by questions about objectivity, meaning, the nature of taste, aesthetic properties, and other exotica that surround this mysterious beverage. But wine considered as an aesthetic object can never be wholly severed from the commercial aspects of wine, and no philosophy of wine is complete without taking into account the influence of commercial categories.

If you stand perplexed before the thousands of choices available on the wine aisles of your supermarket, or if it all tastes like fermented grape juice to you, here is a primer on distinguishing the good stuff from the ordinary.

Any discussion of wine quality must begin with a distinction between commodity wines and premium or fine wines. Commodity wines usually sell for under $15, although the “commercial premium” sector is growing rapidly and pricier wines will increasingly fall into this category. A quality commodity wine is reliable and familiar, with no obvious flaws, easy to drink and designed for immediate consumption. It will spring no surprises that would offend the casual drinker. Unlike the situation 20 years ago, when $10 might have bought you an attractively packaged bottle of battery acid, there are few bad wines on the market today. The technology of mass wine production has made extraordinary advances. Wine connoisseurs will think these wines uninteresting, but they may be full of flavor, food-friendly, and satisfying to drink.

Fine wines of quality sell for considerably more than $15, although you can sometimes find bargains. (There are many wines that fall in between the categories of commodity and premium, and price is no guarantee of quality.) Fine wines of quality will not necessary have smooth textures or familiar flavors. Their virtues may be hard to discern if you don’t know what to look for. Regular consumers of fine wines tend to be fascinated by the diversity of wine styles and the more discriminating are looking for a sense of place where the wine reflects the geographic features of the land on which the grapes are grown. Surprise is a good thing for these connoisseurs, and unusual wines with unconventional flavors may be welcomed. Some of these wines may actually be challenging to drink because they reflect the idiosyncratic vision of the winemaker or come from regions in which the flavor profile changes significantly from year to year because of weather variations. It takes experience and education to appreciate them. Such wines may be interesting even though they don’t hit your pleasure “sweet spot.” They are to be judged according to criteria that emerge from the aesthetic culture that surrounds them. To recognize quality, you have to be acquainted with that wine culture. This is why, in taste tests, untrained subjects will often fail to pick out the more expensive wines.

That said, there are some general criteria that all these various wine cultures look to as benchmarks and can be applied to quality commodity wines (up to a point) as well as fine wines.

Characteristics of a Quality Wine

Dense Texture or Mouthfeel

Most commodity wines will have lots of fruit up front and will taste full in the mouth because they are made with ripe fruit or have residual sugar, both of which create the impression of fullness. But as the tasting experience proceeds, many commodity wines turn watery, sour, or are simply soft and smooth, lacking presence or a firm finish. Quality wines by contrast have a density to them at the midpalate (midway through the taste experience) and some astringency (dryness) on the finish. Even lighter-bodied quality wines have some viscosity and will feel like silk or velvet, coating the mouth rather than simply feeling soft. A quality wine should have a pronounced and pleasing texture regardless of its weight. Harsh, aggressive, or rough wines are of low quality unless they are designed for long aging, in which case they should not be opened when young.

Finesse

Not all quality wines are bold. Some can be slender and delicate. But quality wines that are delicate must have finesse. Their flavors and textures have intricacy and detail which are not delivered all at once but emerge as the tasting experience proceeds. Even bold, powerful wines can have finesse. In fact, this is the sign of greatness in a wine—power plus finesse.

Strong, Persistent Finish

The finish is the impression a wine leaves in the back of your mouth after you have swallowed it. Commodity wines tend to have a short finish with a pronounced drop-off in flavor, because casual consumers are put off by wines that are drying or have a strong aftertaste. By contrast, most connoisseurs of fine wines prefer a long finish with some astringency that comes from tannins in red wine or acidity in whites. Furthermore, in a quality wine, flavors persist all the way through the finish. Some wines may leave a burning sensation in the mouth because of high alcohol or have a bitter finish. These are flaws if they are excessive.

Complexity

Commodity wines are simple with a few generic fruit and spice notes. Quality fine wines will have layers of fruit, spice, herbs, earth, and (in red wine) wood notes that give off different aromas each time you sniff. Which aroma and flavor notes a wine has doesn’t matter in judging quality, as long as there are no off-flavors. What matters are how many aroma notes there are, and how they work together to produce an integrated whole. One important element of complexity is evolution on the palate—a quality wine will show different aspects through the beginning, middle, and end of the tasting experience. By contrast, commodity wines tend to be linear without much development.

Integrated Components

Balance refers to the relationship between sweetness, acidity, tannin, and alcohol. A wine is balanced when none of these components sticks out as being too much. Most commodity wines are balanced for the average consumer because these components are relatively easy to adjust in the winemaking process, and many large wineries do extensive market research to find popular flavor profiles. But more sophisticated wine lovers will find commodity wines too sweet and lacking tannin or acidity. Balance in fine wine has more to do with whether all the components are working together to produce a wine that is perceived as having good structure. The acidity should enhance the fruit, making it seem fresh; the fruit should enhance the tannins softening them so they don’t grip; the fruit should mute the sourness of the acidity. Balance in quality wines is a matter of the components working together, not simply staying out of the way.

Intensity

Commodity wines often have murky flavors that don’t stand out. A quality fine wine will seem to leap out of glass and have clearly delineated flavors that are immediately apparent. However, keep in mind that some quality wines need decanting before they will show the full range of their flavor, and even the best wines can go through a “dumb” stage, where their flavors are muted.

Time in the Bottle

Because commodity wines are designed for immediate consumption, few of them will improve with age. Most quality fine wines in recent years have also been designed to drink when young. Nevertheless, they will have many strong components that must come together before they will show well, and will benefit with some time in the bottle. There is no rule for how much time they need, but for most wines, three years past their vintage date will give the wine time to settle down and become integrated. However, some quality white varietals such as most Sauvignon Blanc should be consumed when young since freshness of fruit is what they offer.

Monday, April 25, 2016

Art and Artification: The Case of Gastronomy

by Dwight Furrow

In grasping the role of art in contemporary life, one noteworthy theme is the process of artification. “Artification” occurs when something not traditionally regarded as art is transformed into art or at least something art-like. As far as I know, the term was first used in a Finnish publication by Levanto, Naukkarinen, and Vihma in 2005 but has found its way into the wider discussion of aesthetics. It is a useful concept for addressing the boundaries between art and non-art that are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated in contemporary society.

The general issue I want to address is whether artification is a confused and superficial misappropriation of art, a kind of "making pretty" of ordinary objects which we normally associate with kitsch. Or should we welcome artification as an enhancement of both art and life?

Since at least the 18th Century we have had a fine arts tradition that included painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, classical music, and the performing arts of dance and theatre. But over the last century cultural phenomena from architecture, film, jazz, rock music, and hip-hop to graffiti, video games, and even some natural objects have aspired to, and to some degree succeeded in, being included in the extension of the concept of art. The world in which "art" refers to a specific kind of object is long past

Furthermore, many cultural practices including advertising, science, and education are being mixed with art in order to introduce creativity, imagination, and emotional engagement. Among this group of artified objects and practices, many people would include gastronomy, which I want to use in this essay to test assumptions about art and artification. What does this process of artification mean in the context of gastronomy?

In their sociological survey of the social processes of artification, Shapiro and Heinich include gastronomy in the category of practices that are artified but have not become full blown arts. To the contrary, I think today some food preparations are candidates for genuine works of art. This is especially true of the fantastic concoctions of molecular gastronomy (aka modernist cuisine) but I think not exclusively so, as more traditional ways of cooking can sometimes deliver the cognitive and emotional impact typical of art. I've argued elsewhere that food can have the depth of meaning and emotional resonance we associate with art, and thus there are no conceptual difficulties in viewing some food preparations as works of art. But part of the question has to do, not with conceptual matters, but with the social practices of food production and consumption and how they are related to art history and the role of art in society. Whether we view gastronomy as an emerging new art form or as a kitschy appropriation of art-like features tacked on to something ordinary depends, in part, on how we tell the story of art history.

It has become canonical to explain that, in the transition from modernism to postmodernism, art collapses into ordinary life. On this view, the modern period of art (roughly the 18th through mid-20th centuries) involved the progressive separation of art from life with the fine arts being valued in themselves, not because they performed a function, instructed the audience or served some larger social purpose. In the process, art gradually discards the techniques of representation toward increasing abstraction. "Art for art's sake" was the slogan invented to describe the autonomous status of art as it shed its connection to representation, distanced itself from the rest of culture, and became concerned solely with the logic of its own development. The result is the high modernism of abstract painting, Schoenberg's 12-tone row, and novels that dispense with most elements of narrative structure.

However, this approach to art runs aground in the mid-20th Century. With modernist art having devolved into an arid, academic exercise and its pretensions to progress unmasked, in the contemporary, postmodern world this separation of art from life has collapsed. Art has been fully absorbed into the world of commodity production and entertainment. There is no longer a distinction between high culture and pop culture. Kitsch and camp are artistic styles to be thrown into the pluralist mix with other styles from art history, and postmodern artists use collage and fragmentation to disrupt genres and display attitudes of irony and parody toward anything that takes a stand. Art lacks deep meaning, all value commitments are unstable and insincere, and the artist as genius gives way to art as a democratized mash-up of superficial images and sounds.

According to this story of emerging postmodernism, food is just the latest in a series of profane objects to be gussied up and presented as art in order to serve the commercial market. For unreconstructed modernists, this constitutes the further degradation of art but, in any case, there is nothing profound going on in mixing food and art. For under postmodern conditions, art is just entertainment like anything else. To artify is simply to mix features of art production or consumption with some other sphere in order to enhance market value, food being the latest candidate.

But certain features of the food revolution belie this analysis.

Of course we eat to satisfy hunger and gain nutrition. However, food no longer serves a purely utilitarian function as it did throughout much of our history. As the food revolution in the U.S. blossoms, "foodies" eat for pure enjoyment and to experience a variety of meanings that food has as a symbol of home, cultural traditions, and moral identities. Furthermore, as our lives are increasingly dominated by the values of the workplace—competition, speed-up, disruption, the pursuit of profit and efficiency—the culture of the table is that place in our lives where an alternative way of life can take root if only in our imaginations. The culture of the table values slow, patient savoring, authenticity, personal creativity and a sense of community in contrast to the corporate world that respects none of these. In short, food has acquired intrinsic (i.e. non-instrumental) value. It is the dimension of life in which we put care before commerce and pleasure before production.

Obviously there are aspects of the food revolution that depend on media saturation, celebrity, and consumerism. The culture of the table is hardly autonomous from the rest of culture. Yet, its commitment to an alternative value system is real and explains the emergence of food as a modern art form.

But this commitment to an alternative system of values suggests that the modernism/postmodernism frame cannot explain this cultural shift, since our preoccupation with food does not appear to be fully absorbed into commodity production and superficial entertainment. Instead, the artification of food offers a profound shift in fundamental meanings, a shift that is best explained not by the modernism/postmodernism story but by the alternative narrative offered by French philosopher Jacques Rancière.

According to Rancière, much art throughout history followed a structured system of norms specifying what could be the proper subject of art, the techniques that allowed for its skillful production, and how these art objects were to be appreciated. However, in the 19th Century traditional art is largely, although not completely, replaced by what he calls the "aesthetic regime of art". The "aesthetic regime" is a set of beliefs about the nature of art, what it can do and how it is related to society, the "conditions that make it possible for words, shapes, movements and rhythms to be felt and thought as art." (From Rancière, Aisthesis: Themes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art) In other words, art was about a kind of experience, not a kind of object.

As a result, inexorably throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the norms governing the nature of art and its proper subject matter are swept away, the boundaries between genres are increasingly fragile, and aesthetics as a distinct kind of experience and subject matter is born. Modernism far from being the advent of the autonomy of art is rather a kind of sensibility, a way of looking at everyday objects as art-like. Ordinary objects acquired depth of meaning through their artistic presentation but at the same time these presentations raised questions about how art is related to or different from life, in the absence of rules for distinguishing in advance the objects of art from the products of everyday life. That difference now has to be negotiated rather than taken for granted. The aesthetic regime enables us to see art and life as continually overlapping, while remaining distinctly different. Art is not autonomous from everyday life as the modernist would have it. Neither is it fully absorbed into culture as the postmodernists would argue. Art's autonomy and heteronomy are inextricably linked and in constant tension.

Thus the chaos of the contemporary art world, where anything can be a potential art object, is not an exhausted reaction to the overweening radical pretensions and abstractions of modernism but is an extension of a change in sensibility that occurred long ago in the emergence of aesthetic experience. Art hasn't lost its autonomy from culture as the modernism/postmodernism story would have it but continues the process of continually renegotiating this territory by recasting the stage on which things appear.

This ability to reorder our patterns of sensory experience gives art political potential. For Rancière, aesthetic art induces political change, not because it takes politics as its theme but because it alters what can be seen, heard or said—it redistributes voices, practices, and objects by revising the meaning of what appears to our senses. And this ability to assign multiple meanings to objects is a result of the ambiguous, complex relationship between art and life. Art is dependent on everyday objects and practices, and nevertheless distinct from the everyday, placing the objects on a pedestal and highlighting features that in everyday experience we pass over.

In Rancière's telling, the key conceptual innovation that makes possible the aesthetic regime is Schiller's interpretation of Kant in Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind. Kant argued that aesthetic judgments do not conform to the categories that made the understanding of ordinary objects possible. Aesthetic judgment involves the "free play" of the imagination and understanding—art forces us to imaginatively restructure objects without recourse to rules. Schiller, following up on Kant's appeal to imaginative play, thought of aesthetics as a "heterogeneous" sensibility that unravels the hierarchies and divisions of reason, including the structures of society that regulate relations between the ruler and the ruled. Schiller argues that aesthetics carries "the promise of equality, the promise of a new way of sharing the common world".

The concept of "play" is central because, through play, the beautiful and life are linked. Schiller writes:"Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man, and he is only wholly Man when he is playing." And thus, Rancière defines play as "any activity that has no end other than itself, that does not intend to gain any effective power over things or persons."(from Aesthetics and its Discontents) Play re-distributes the sensible and makes possible new forms of sensory experience that transform the background assumptions through which we judge what can be seen and heard but has no purpose other than enjoyment.

Which brings us back to food as a form of contemporary art form. Food is something we require everyday and its production and consumption play a central role in providing structure to everyday life. Yet in contemporary society it occupies that borderland between art and the everyday which, in Rancière's view, it is the role of the aesthetic regime of art to negotiate. As noted above, the culture of the table introduces an alternative set of values in contrast to those that are dominant in our lives today. Through limiting its instrumental value and acquiring intrinsic value our relationship with food fits the Schiller/ Rancière conception of play. And as we develop aesthetic forms of cooking and eating our conception of time is reordered. Whereas time compression and speed-up order our lives to conform to the demands of more production, the imperative to slow down and taste the tomatoes is a key feature of the food revolution. As I argue more thoroughly in American Foodie, the culture of the table is about the recovery of contemplation and stillness that enable us to bring new sensory experiences to consciousness. This reordering of the sensible is precisely the function of art as Rancière understands it.

Thus the example of gastronomy shows that artification need not be a superficial importation of features of art to everyday life that devalues art. If artification provides a richer more contemplative approach to food, and makes us more attentive to the deeper meanings that food has, then artification enhances both art and life, and makes food a candidate for a genuine art.

Monday, February 29, 2016

Eating: The Not So Simple Pleasure

by Dwight Furrow

Plunging into a bowl of chili differs from a dog's dinner only by degrees. Slobbering, slurping, and gnashing, the dense but yielding meat mingles with the earthiness of dried peppers. The gathering heat pleads to be chased with a swallow of cold, bitter beer that cuts the tension with a flood of endorphin-induced satisfaction.

Well, it's not all that special—just a bowl of chili. But the simple act of consumption is undeniably rewarding. Food and drink provide us with an immediate hedonic reaction—no thinking, no analysis, no bothersome complexity. Our own likes and dislikes rule without judgment. You either like it or you don't and no one can tell you you're wrong (if you put away the calorie counter).

Such unreflective feasting is not exactly information-rich, but it is not utterly blind either. Dominant flavors and textures are familiar and thus instantly recognizable. But each forkful is more or less like the other and any evolution on the palate is buried by the next rapidly following mouthful. The satisfactions of this sort of eating can be had while thinking about more important matters like world peace or getting your nails done.

We all eat like this sometimes. Our nature dictates it. Evolution designed us, under conditions of scarcity, to crave such brute pleasure as a hedge against tomorrow when food might be unavailable. Life would be diminished if we could not enjoy this kind of eating.

But another kind of eating is possible and ultimately more important. With some focused attention, even a simple bowl of chili has interesting imensions: a slight smokiness from the bacon and charred chunks of beef, an unexpected fruity note from an abundance of aji panca chiles, and multiple savory layers from hours of slow cooking that we can appreciate only by attending to the shifting balance of flavors as they evolve on the palate. In a bowl of chili, there is food for thought as well as for consumption.

In fact, there is more complexity than can be grasped in one sitting. Thoughtful eating requires sustained cognitive attention over many meals if one aspires to understand the subtle significance of the variety of pepper or cut of meat used. Chili is one of those dishes about which families feud and geographical regions remonstrate, and the search for just the right secret ingredient to distinguish one's recipe can become a life-long quest. We engage all of our mental faculties when we notice how flavors interact, attend to the chef's expression of particular aspects of the ingredients, and imagine the cultural heritage behind what we are eating when we recall the regional origins displayed in the dish.

This interplay of understanding, memory, and imagination is inherently pleasurable. But this pleasure results from contemplation, concentration, training, and the satisfactions of discovery. It is work. Intellectual labor.

Is it worth it?

The virtue of a thoughtful approach to pleasure is that it multiplies pleasure-and in the realm of pleasure more is usually better. We too often think of pleasure as a mere sensation that passively afflicts us and then disappears once the source of the pleasure has been consumed. But this limited understanding leaves too much pleasure on the table. In fact, pleasure invites thought. Pleasure intensifies perception, makes it stand out from the course of day-to-day experience. It thus intensifies our interest in the source of pleasure, and the whys and wherefores that make the pleasure intelligible. Pleasure, having become a mystery, is no less pleasurable and when the mystery is solved the pleasure of discovery is a bonus that ramifies into the future. Subsequent experiences of that pleasure thus become more meaningful and more rewarding because we notice things we could not have discerned before. The discovery that aji panca chiles have a fruity flavor encourages us to focus on those fruity notes in the chili that we might pass over if we lacked that expectation, which enables us to draw precise contrasts with recipes using different combinations of chiles. Furthermore knowing that aji panca chiles originate in Peru reminds us of the migration patterns of populations, the inherent instability of cultural boundaries, or the effects of climate on ingredients.

There is a lot to think about in that bowl.

Reflective eating wrests differences from homogeneity and relationships from isolated instances. It identifies the source of an ingredient, the variety of its uses, and the way different people perceive it. It traces the way dishes, ingredients, and their cultures provoke our imagination, enable us to speculate, hypothesize, plan, or dream. All of these benefits are generated from what at first seems a simple hedonic response.

Thoughtful eating can change the self as well. When pleasure becomes thought, we manage, at least to some degree, to overcome the limitations of personal preference. We come to see the dimensions and value of something even if at first we don't like it. It has meaning beyond personal interest or a simple yea or nay. But more importantly, when pleasure becomes thought, it also becomes discourse. We mistakenly think of pleasure as something purely subjective and private-of course we experience pleasure with our own mind and senses. But pleasure is heightened when we are able to share it, and the more we can think and talk about pleasure, the more sharable it becomes.

Ultimately, this question about the value of thoughtful eating is a question about what kind of life to lead. That is too big a topic for this humble blog post. But surely a life devoted to squeezing every ounce of value from each experience is intrinsically valuable and a worthy candidate for a good life. This cannot be accomplished without thought. The problem with simple (unreflective) pleasures is that they leave too much value on the table, too much beauty not experienced, too much potential unfulfilled.

As Mark Twain wrote "Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward." (From A Connecticut Yankee...)

But all this thinking makes me hungry. A bowl of chili and a beer sounds just right.

Monday, February 01, 2016

Why Americans are Fascinated by Food

by Dwight Furrow

For much of the 20th Century, the U.S. was a culinary backwater. Outside some immigrant enclaves where old world traditions were preserved, Americans thought of food as nutrition and fuel. Food was to be cheap, nutritious (according to the standards of the day) and above all convenient; the pleasures of food if attended to at all were a minor domestic treat unworthy of much public discussion.

How times have changed! Today, celebrity chefs strut across the stage like rock stars, a whole TV network is devoted to explaining the intricacies of fermentation or how to butcher a hog, countless blogs recount last night's meal in excruciating detail, and competitions for culinary capo make the evening news. We talk endlessly about the pleasures of food, conversations that are supported by specialty food shops, artisan producers, and aisles of fresh, organic produce in the supermarket. Restaurants, even small neighborhood establishments, feature chefs who cook with creativity and panache.

Why this sudden interest in food? As I argue in American Foodie: Taste, Art and the Cultural Revolution, our current interest in food is a search for authenticity, face-to-face contact, local control, and personal creativity amidst a world that is increasingly standardized, bureaucratic, digitized, and impersonal. In contemporary life, the public world of work, with its incessant demands for efficiency and profit, has colonized our private lives. The pressures of a competitive, unstable labor market, the so-called "gig" economy, along with intrusive communications technology make it increasingly difficult to escape a work world governed by the value of efficiency. This relentless acceleration of demands compresses our sense of time so we feel like there is never enough of it. Standardization destroys the uniqueness of localities and our social lives are spread across the globe in superficial networks of "contacts" where we interact with brands instead of whole persons. The idea that something besides production and consumption should occupy our attention, such as a sense of community or self-examination, seems quaint and inefficient—a waste of time. Thus, we lose touch with ourselves while internalizing the self-as-commodity theme and hiving off all aspects of our lives that might harm our "brand"—a homogenized, marketable self. Even our vaunted and precious capacity to choose is endangered, for we no longer choose based on a sensibility shaped by our unique experiences; instead our sensibilities are constructed by corporate choice architects, informed by their surveys and datamining that shepherd our decisions.

Food comes to the rescue. It is no accident that the food revolution is informed by the Slow Food movement, the celebration of local tastes and local ingredients, and an anti-corporate undercurrent that resists this colonization of private life by the values of the workplace. Through the exploration of taste, people seek to preserve areas in life where creative playfulness and a sense of community take center stage. For a variety of reasons, food is the logical choice for this rebirth of private creativity. We seek to recapture a sense of agency though preoccupation with our own sense of taste. The food revolution is fundamentally an aesthetic revolution driven by a felt need to stop the further encroachment of workplace demands on our private lives.

What is it about food that makes it the appropriate vehicle for this resistance?

The activities of producing and consuming food pervade all aspects of life. They shape family life, influence all variety of social relationships, explain the texture of community life, and help shape our personal identities as well. But more importantly, the pleasures of food have a kind of intrinsic value that, when taken seriously, provide a rewarding, edifying outlook on life that puts pleasure before production, geniality before greed, and care before commerce. The pleasures of food, because they are ubiquitous, are ideally situated to restore our sense that there are features of everyday life that should not be sacrificed on the altar of efficiency. The genuine appreciation of food requires that we slow down, experience the present in all its richness, and tap into our creative potential as we attend to the needs of others, a form of resistance to a sped-up work life that all of us can exercise.

Thus, food has taken on a variety of meanings it never had in the past—it is a modern art form concerned with the expression of heritage, personal creativity, individual autonomy and the sanctification of everyday life.

Food is indeed "the New Rock", a pleasurable medium though which we can begin to conceptualize a form of life that resists the encroachment of workplace values and imagine a more civilized existence. Whether it can succeed or not will depend on whether the slow rhythms, love of place and community, and commitment to quality over quantity can resonate throughout other areas of life while withstanding the predations of corporate plutocracy.

Monday, January 04, 2016

Wine, Love and Spirituality

by Dwight Furrow

This is what it is to go aright, or to be led by another into the mystery of Love: one goes always upwards for the sake of this Beauty starting out from beautiful things and using them like rising stairs…. (211 c-d, Plato's Symposium)

We throw the word "love" around without really meaning it. We "love" ice cream, sunsets, or the latest soon-to-be-forgotten pop song. But such "love" requires no commitment and hardly seems worthy of being in the same category as the love of one's child or spouse. Yet, some objects or activities are worthy objects of love because they solicit our sustained attention and care—a great work of art, a career, baseball, a religion. For some people wine seems to fall into this latter category of worthy objects of love. Many people abandon lucrative, stable careers for the uncertainties and struggles of winemaking; others spend a lifetime of hard intellectual labor to understand its intricacies; still others circle the globe seeking to sample rare and unusual bottles. Wine seems to have an attraction that goes beyond mere "liking"—a spiritual dimension that requires explanation.

The spiritual dimension of wine has a long history. Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was said to inhabit the soul with the power of ecstasy—the Ancient Greek word ekstasis meant standing outside the self via madness or artistic expression, and wine was thought to encourage that transformation . The Romans called the same God Bacchus with similar associations. The Judeo/Christian world tames the ecstasy yet still acknowledges the virtues of wine. Judaism has long included wine in its rituals for which it incorporates a specific blessing, and of course, for Christians, wine represents the blood of Christ and gets a number of mentions in the Bible. Other alcoholic beverages have existed for as long or longer than wine, but none have its spiritual connotations.

Today, wine is just one among many alcoholic beverages consumed in great quantities. Yet it sustains its sacramental role—as status symbol, fashion statement, a sign of class, refinement, or sophistication, a source of intellectual delight, the object of a quest for a peak experience, or the focal point of social life—all contemporary renditions of "spiritual" some more debased than others.

What makes wine an appropriate object of love? Why does wine have this spiritual dimension? It isn't only because of the alcohol. Cheap whiskey doesn't have it. It is not because it tastes good. Lots of beverages or foods taste good, but they lack wine's power to move us.

Spirituality is about inward transformation. Dionysus was a gender-bending, shape-shifting God who entered the soul and transformed the identity of the one afflicted. Go with Dionysus and achieve ecstasy by escaping the confines of one's identity; resist and be torn apart by conflicting passions, according to the myth. Wine too is about transformation–the grapes in the vineyard, the wine in the barrel and bottle, the drink in the glass as its volatile chemicals release an aromatic kaleidoscope of fleeting, irresolute incense. Wine changes profoundly over time. In turn, the drinker is transformed by the wine. But not merely by the alcoholic loosening of inhibitions or the ersatz identity appropriated through wine's symbolic association with status. Instead, the wine lover, at least on rare occasion, is transformed by the openness to experience she undergoes when gripped by sensations whose very beauty compels her full attention. For unlike any other drink, wine has that ability to arrest our habitual heedlessness and distracted preoccupation and rivet our attention on something awe-inspiring yet utterly inconsequential, without aim or purpose, lacking in survival value, monetary reward, or salutary advance in our assets.

In a recent essay on this site, I argued that being gripped by a sensation of genuine quality, not merely having a sensation but being moved by it, is a pre-condition of love. By "genuine quality" I mean the properties of something or someone that promise more than superficial engagement because they exhibit great variety or complexity, intensity, and provide a deep contrast with static, familiar, ordinary things. Complexity, intensity, and stark singularity have this power to move us because they indicate that the object and our relationship to it have great developmental potential. They extend the promise that further involvement will take us on a journey where new paths are forged and new connections made. There is mystery about the object and how it unfolds over time that sparks the imagination. This felt potential for further engagement is a natural lure that makes something "loveable", that demands we care about it.

The people we fall in love with have this mystery engendered by complexity, intensity, and stark contrast with the ordinary. The wines we fall in love with have it as well. It is the essence of the "aha" moment that most wine lovers experience and strive to rediscover. It is not merely sensory quality that matters but the potential for further engagement signaled by the sensory quality that matters, a promise of things to come that sparks the imagination. Ice cream, sunsets, and mere acquaintances don't provide that spark. Of course whether we fall in love or not depends on how that engagement proceeds, but the initial impetus toward love is aesthetic and seems akin to a sculptor seeing potential in a block of stone. Love begins as a promise of adventure dragging us toward an indeterminate end.

When we are so transfixed by the sensory surface of the world, we stand outside that nexus of practical concerns and settling of accounts that makes up the self. Shorn of that identity we drink in the flavors seduced by the thought that there is goodness in the world—whole, unadulterated, without measure. This is part of the attraction of great art and music—a moment of ecstasy. So it is with wine. No other beverage has the depth, complexity, and textural refinement to create that momentary mutation of the self.

But what is it about wine that can deliver on this sense of mystery and adventure? Is wine just a pretty face promising something that in the end remains superficial, incapable of sustaining mystery? Sensuality is only the beginning of love; a beloved must reward sustained attention, it must really have the depth of meaning the sensory surface promises, otherwise we lose interest. And, indeed, attraction to wine does not remain purely sensual. Most people who get in to it do more than drink it. They want to learn about it or produce it or seek it out embarking on a path of discovery. All wine lovers are moved by a sense of discovery.

Beyond the sensory features, the key feature of wine that makes it an object of love is that it reflects its origins. Wine when properly made exhibits the features of the vineyard and climate in which the grapes are grown, the decisions of the winemaker when contemplating her approach to a vintage, the craft and skill of the crew that makes the wine, and the taste of the community that has nurtured a style of winemaking for decades if not centuries. It is that fascination with origins that sustains the pursuit. But why should this evocation of origins be so important?

Psychologist Paul Bloom has been arguing that fascination with origins is baked into human experience.

…we respond to what we believe are objects' deeper properties, including their histories. Sensory properties are relevant and so is signaling, but the pleasure we get from the right sort of history explains much of the lure of luxury items—and of more mundane consumer items as well…. We are not empiricists, obsessed with appearance. Rather, the surfaces of things are significant largely because they reflect an object's deeper nature.

According to Bloom a genuine Armani suit or Rolex watch is worth more than an identical knock-off because we care about their origins. We value objects more if we own them, chose them or had to work hard to get them. We value objects that have been touched by celebrities or if they have some special story behind them, including of course objects that have something to do with our own past. What all these examples have in common is an evocative history.

In his book How Pleasure Works, Bloom assembles compelling empirical evidence that this focus on history is universal and emerges early in childhood.

Bloom's analysis seems especially appropriate for wine because the wine world has traditionally been organized to reflect the importance of history and place of origin. Connoisseurs spend thousands for a bottle of Lafite-Rothschild, a storied chateau in Bordeaux, the most famous wine region in the word, even though there are wines equally compelling at a fraction of the cost. Classic wine regions have for centuries marketed wines based on location rather than varietal because consumers value this connection to place. Wine lovers fall head over heels for wines from obscure regions or that are distinctive because they reflect the unique characteristics of a vineyard even though perfectly acceptable industrial wines are available at the supermarket. Wine tourists are willing to spend $40 for a bottle at the winery that might be worth $10 on the supermarket shelf, especially if they meet the winemaker and tour the facility where the wine is made and thus are able to connect the wine to its origin. Wine is a beverage uniquely able to reflect its origins via flavors, aromas, and textures, and classic wine regions have spent centuries cultivating those characteristics that make them distinctive. Newer wine regions are hard at work trying to discover what sets them apart because having a compelling story about origins will connect them to wine lovers.

Bloom is wrong to discount the importance of sensory properties. After all, if a wine lacks distinctive sensory properties we won't care about its origins and will quickly lose interest. Love begins with sensation but the beloved must promise more—in the case of wine it is the allure of location and the human qualities that feed its production that engender love because these have the depth to carry us on a journey of discovery and connection.

This is why artisanal winemaking methods and an ideology that resists industrial winemaking methods that cover up or distort the influence of the vineyard are so important in preserving wine's status as an object of love. Without that connection to place and history, wine risks becoming just another commodity, pleasant and enjoyable to be sure, but without the depth of meaning that wine lovers crave and thus incapable of fulfilling (with apologies to Plato) the Dionysian promise to climb love's ladder.

Monday, December 07, 2015

Mutant Nature

by Dwight Furrow

Nature is not disappearing; it's just hiding in your salad bowl.

Throughout most of human history human beings were utterly dependent on nature and everything about human life was determined by it. Adapt or die was the imperative that governed all life and so nature seemed infinite and without measure, a fact recognized by 18th century theories of the sublime. Yet, throughout most of that history, we refused to acknowledge this dependence striving to see ourselves as ultimately separate from nature. The separation of mind and body, of earth and heaven, the opposition of nature and culture, were taken to be simply obvious.

But today we have reversed that equation. Inexorably, we have learned to control nature through technologies which have reached such a critical mass that nature has been reduced to a mere instrument to be carved up and used as we see fit—a "standing reserve" as Heidegger called it. Even our biological make up will soon be subject to fundamental manipulation as gene editing comes online. The result is that nature now seems finite and fragile, disappearing under the deluge of techno-science and mass industrialization.

Paradoxically, as we gain more control over nature we have begun to acknowledge our dependence on it, as the Paris climate talks get underway amidst a deepening sense of crisis. The consequences of ignoring our dependence on nature are all too evident. For us today nature is both an instrument to be used up and a center of independent power, a Janus-faced phenomenon, on the one hand limited and circumscribed by human activity but on the other hand generating effluvia that create a devilishly devious constraint on human activity. The resistance of nature yields to our technology in countless ways but leaves behind a residue of pollution and devastation that threatens to undermine that hard won human control.

Human history increasingly looks like a struggle between two forces: a closed off nature that we must simply react to, an obdurate matter that never fully reveals itself to us, versus a dream of absolute dominion. This dream of dominion dispenses with the idea of nature altogether once we have grasped enough of nature's inner workings to make all fundamental elements analyzable into parts and capable of recombination. Neither combatant in this struggle seems particularly conducive to human existence at least as we know it.

There is however a third option. There is perhaps no longer any reason to think of nature and culture as separate phenomena with fundamentally different characteristics. The more we learn about culture the more it seems penetrated by nature, by our biological inheritance and physical makeup; the more we learn about nature the more it seems penetrated by culture as we gain facility at manipulating the physical world at a fundamental level. Culture is simply one way of organizing nature, different quantities or intensities of the same stuff that differs only in being maximally or minimally resistant to human activity.

French philosopher Michel Serres argues that we should understand "nature" and "culture" not as separate ontological categories but in terms of the metaphors of "the hard" and "the soft."* As we sever the hard bonds that tie us to nature, the bonds of necessity that technology has disrupted, we come to recognize the importance of the soft bonds that lie at the foundation of meaning. If I understand him correctly, by "hard" Serres means matter that is maximally resistant to human action. By "soft" he means matter (broadly construed) that is yielding and malleable such as language and information. The effect of seeing nature and culture as part of a continuum is to make more important the cultural bonds that tie us to nature. We now view nature only through the lens of culture. Here is Serres on these soft bonds:

Flying high enough to see her [the earth] whole, we find ourselves tethered to her by the totality of our knowledge, the sum of our technologies, the collection of our communications; by torrents of signals, by the complete set of imaginable umbilical cords, living and artificial, visible and invisible, concrete or purely formal. By casting off from her from so far, we pull on these cords to the point that we comprehend them all. (Serres, The Natural Contract, 106)

There is no longer an outside to culture and no longer a pure essence of nature resistant to culture. It is only through knowledge, culture and communication that we sustain bonds to what we used to call nature.

All of this provides background for attempts to understand our current fascination with everything that reminds us of the "natural"—natural foods, natural wine, farm-to-table-respect-the-ingredients cooking, and opposition to industrial foods, to name just a few. Taste and the ordinary (i.e. non-industrial) practices of preparing ingredients for consumption are one way we take the hard surfaces of nature and make them accessible, softening their edges while never fully canceling their resistance.

Although long ignored as a subject of serious intellectual concern, matters of taste have come to occupy the center of culture and they sample deeply from this cauldron of interest in everything "natural". It is in the arena of food and beverage where the transformation of the meaning of "natural" is most pronounced. Industrial food is the most salient example of how nature as standing reserve penetrates everyday life. There, nature is broken into its chemical elements and recombined according to whatever recipe of efficiency will earn a profit, only to reappear as poor health and poor taste—and so foodies and wine geeks resist this reduction demanding freshness, organic, "real food", with minimal manipulation or additives.

Understood as an attempt to return to a pure state of unadulterated wildness, these appeals to nature are at best nostalgic and at worst a simple lie. What we call "natural" is no less marked by human culture than jeans or symphonies. But interest in "the natural" is not best understood as an attempt to return to a pristine state before the fall. The health and environmental reasons for this "natural" approach to food are obvious but there are symbolic purposes being served as well, symbolic purposes that are easily exploited by the marketing arm of our technocracy overlords. As nature disappears under the onslaught of techno-science it becomes visible again only via cultural practices that symbolize brute physicality—"the hard" to use Serres' terminology, something that offers resistance to human intervention without being outside its orbit. The word "natural", when not co-opted by advertising, symbolizes our recognition that resistance to human intention is sometimes a virtue; some things are "hard" and should not be simply used up.

This negotiation between "hard" and "soft" is not restricted to taste. As Serres points out, sensation in general is the primary locus of the transformation of the hard to the soft, a matter of filtering the hard surfaces of nature making them accessible to human experience.

Sensation, never pure, filters energies, protects itself and us from an excess of it, encodes and passes on information: it transforms hard into soft' (Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mangled Bodies, 115).

With nature no longer an impenetrable force, history then becomes a spectacle of human vs. human, the resistance of the world now just another cultural artifact occupying the hard side of the continuum subject to being softened by human practices. Perhaps we can understand our contemporary fascination with sports, guns, violence, and mayhem, mediated though they are by technology, as a paean to the lost world of the brutely physical, the "hard" that resists assimilation to the information machine but paradoxically becomes just another howl at the moon.

*For a reasonably accessible introduction to Serres' thought see this paper by Steven Connor.